Softimage Blog

A whole lot of time can be wasted by tweeking a parameter in XSI when you don’t know the units it’s expressed in. This is especially true in simulation. Simulations You can deduce the units of a parameter rapidly with only a few tries. The Age of a particle is expressed in seconds, not frames. [...]

When it comes to math, sometimes is hard to visualize what you are doing, if you are working with vectors and transformations the debugging process can be slow and tedious, you cannot even use primitives to trace positions and rotations if you are writing scripted operators. My workflow was to write quick run-once scripts in [...]

I created XSIBatch what seems to be a hundred years ago, and it was created only for the purpose of address a specific Windows problem. On IRIX, xsibatch used to be a simple link to ”xsi”, they were completely identical. The problem addressed was that under windows, an application must specify whether it”s a console [...]

Some tips about mastering the XSI SDK

When you are working on a shot with a live background plate, chances are that you will have to match the angle of view from the camera that shot the plate with the virtual camera in the your scene. XSI has some tools to facilitate this process, but it”s still not easy enough for most artists without a good knowledge of the relation between the focal length and filmback to understand. I wanted to ease the process more so that anyone could find the right camera angle as easily as possible. I wrote RealLens.