hey everybody....im just curious if anybodies tried either of these programs. Im a big fan of both Maya and Softimage, but both of these versions have all of the new "real time SDK" junk. i just wonder how much better they are than past versions....or in the XSI case...if its any better than Maya. So if anybody has any info...please let me know!! -Luxury

My company just recieved Softimage|XSI, and I thought I''d let you in on just how wonderful this animating tool is.

With my background in Softimage|3D, I found XSI to be even more user-friendly than SI|3D. It doesn''t take long to learn.

The animating tools are wonderful, EVERYTHING can be animated,
and you have total control over all that happends, so you don''t have to worry about "destroying" anything (the "non-destructive environment" they''ve been talking about).

The render tree lets you create STUNNINGLY realistic materials, and you can control every parameter there is and apply shaders to these (Density of glass edges by adding shaders to the ambient parts of your material for instance..)
You can also combine an almsot unlimited amount of shaders, to create complex materials/textures/effects.

I also have to mention the animation mixer, where you can create complex movements by overlapping different animation sequences, and adjusting the weight between them.

The rendering is also faster in XSI than in SI|3D, specially useful when previewing in the render-region. The render-region is a preview screen (which you can resize, move, etc) in any viewport, while modelling, that shows you the final-rendered result quickly.

Well I could go on and on and..

All I can say is, when it comes to animating or rendering, Softimage|XSI with Mental Ray 2.1 is probably the best you''ll find. There are a lot of new tools, but too many to mention.

I think there will be more modelling tools in XSI too, but they haven''t released any new versions yet. They are on their way though.. and since you get support for some time, you get the newest versions for free.

thanks for the info Tomas. yeah...i really liked the look of the xsi animation system. glad to hear that it actually works well.

but i got a flyer yesterday from softimage advertising xsi, and it said that it came bundled with soft3d3.9. why would it come with that? maybe ill attend one of their little showcases/sales pitch to get my answers answered.

-Luxury

Makes sense to me.