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It's had enough attention at Siggraph 2005 to be named the best 3d package there is. The lowest version "Foundation" now retails at £299 ex vat and postage. (has since last year.) They made Half Life 2 with it.

It allows for .fx editing and programming and shaders in the viewport. It generates normal maps onto low res meshes from high res meshes with ease using the new Ultimapper. It is probably the best non-linear animation package around, which allows for animations to be transfered between models by just dragging and dropping. (And you can do the transition from a walk to a run in a couple of minutes.) It bakes lightmaps using global illumination/final gathering from Mental Ray.

The new giga_polygon core allows for eding of a over 100 million polygons+ onscreen.

Oh, it seems to, as far as I've tested, export animated/boned/textured and animated .x files fine into DBPRo.

I'm not a salesman for Softimage, but I have just bought v5. I advise everyone to take a look at the new demo videos at [href]www.softimage.com[/href] and stuff knocking around at [href]www.xsibase.com[/href], like tutorials and stuff.

I've used XSI for a little year now, but still hanging at XSI 4.2
I may consider updating to 5.0 but I' gonna wait till the price for updating drops, as I'm sure it will eventually. I'm very pleased with XSI, and for me the workflow was faster than 3DsMax.

Might've been because it was the only one actually on show.
Maya 7 and Max 8 both were just videos of what's new rather than people getting to physically play with them.

XSI5 doesn't really add enough over 4.x to make it worth while imo.
Just like Maya 6.5 didn't add enough over 6.0 to make it worth the upgrade.

Foundation XSI has very very few tools compared to the Advanced version. On the whole 5.0 Foundation doesn't add that much more, and it still lacks quite a number of tools that would provide a better Low-Polygon (game) pipeline. This is why so many Softimage|XSI games can be seen from a mile away.

Everything from Half-Life 2 to Resident Evil 4, looks fairly samey in terms of the art output because of the tools in XSI. I've personally found it frustrating the lack of control you have over the output from the problem.

Almost everything that is released has a very soft feel to it. Sometimes this is good, other times it's bad. While I do admit XSI is the best budget choice right now, it does take some getting used to from other applications.

Particularly if you've been using them for long enough to get used to the work pipelines.

- I've been waiting it out for v5. Glad I did! I think the upgrade is a good price - I'll be interested what the prices are when 5.5 or 6 comes around...

Raven - I was actually just drawing peoples attention to an exceptional software package for 3d that is easily within the price range of people on this board. (I'll be using it for Arch Viz/Game assets/animation, thanks very much). I think I can survive without the extras. Noone needs to use HAIR or RIGID BODY dynamics or BEHAVIOUR in DBPRo. Nor do they need the material layers, rendering plugins, reference models, GATOR would be handy but hey...
None of the omitted tools that are in Ess/Advanced are necessary for making good assets for DBPRo.

As for output - thanks for mentioning Half Life 2 and Res Evil 4 - perhaps 2 of the best looking games ever made... Soft as in... subtle? sophisticated? realistic?

You need to delve a bit deeper to get round the "frustration" - using a new package is ALWAYS frustrating because you're always asking - how do I do this, how do I do that? - (things that seemed easier in the old one)? But in the end, you look around the net, you read the help files, you find a new way.

I've used all the packages in the past. And when XSI became £299, I made an extra effort to get to know it a bit deeper, after a few free video tutorials and that "frustrating lack of control" I soon realised was my "frustrating lack of understanding" of the package. Which is probably what you were finding. The tools are great in XSI. Most of it, except shaders is easier and much smoother to use than the other packages (the flexibility of shader trees are way beyond most packages - and easily comparable to Maya). Jumping in and out of different construction/viewing modes is a breeze, and if you know exactly what you are doing, flows far better than Max or Maya. Scripting is fantastic too. If you find some things a little long winded you create a little button and 10 tasks become 1, very easily.

Now I've got into the way XSI works it is just better than anything I've used before. Just more LOGICAL. It doesn't wast time doing things unless you ask it (which makes things more of a struggle at the start but it doesn't take long to grasp the reasoning behind this, and plus I hate icons, I like buttons with plain words and shortcut keys.)

Work pipeline for dark basic pro? Build model, texture model, animate model, export as .x model. Add command in DBPro to load model, animate model. You're away...

i must say im being seduced to the softimage side, im an experienced max user, although not as much experienced has i would like to be, plus im having major problems with max, thow recently ive learnet biped and lightmaping baking in max, im having problems to test biped, the software inst running properly, another thing that i hate in max is the absence of WYSIWYG, i cant configure the viewports correctly, and believe me when i say i did almost anything humanly possible, my best screen grabs are when i change video mode to opengl (plus some minor configs), but opengl is just to slow on my machine to be able to edit in that videomode, i hate how the textures look in screen grab, they come very different after exporting, and that sucks because i have no ideia how things will look in the end.

also a big friend of mine his telling me to start using softimage....hmmm...i dont know what to do...i myght give a try to softimage, but it doesnt has biped, and if you know what biped is, you will know what i mean, biped is just the best thing in animation, its amazing !

I've heard softimage is good, but if i ever want to try it i have to buy a new monitor - i've got a 15 inch with a maximum resolution of 1024 by 768, which means it is too small to view everything in xsi

@supremacy if you want to make screenies from any of the views just click the maximize viewport button at the bottom right you could alos do ctrl+x for expert mode this way you have a biggest window possible, g will remove the grids from your view right click on the name of the perspectave (top,front,left,perspectave) and it will have a list of rendering modes click smooth+highlights for a smooth shaded model.

You can turn up the resolution of the textures displayed in the view port - it's somewhere in the settings

yea,

customize/preferences/viewports/configure driver and then tick both match bitmaps as closeley as possible, you could allways render aswell maybe a simple clay render looks nice

this is basic stuff...



basic stuff to.

i know all this and much more, i still have tre problem, i even turn on self lighting up to the max, and much much more tricks, ive research about this a lot more then you 2 guys can possible think, i still have this "problem" of mine, its just something that cannot be done and that i get "picky" with it, just doesnt looks like the screenies from milkS3d, its because of the open gl rendering, and yes i know max can render open gl, so before nagging me on that read my first post again.

but i fail to see your problem, so what it doesnt look good on software or d3d rendering in the viewport? it isnt exactly build for major graphical effects, thats what rendering is for just stick to doing a render.

First things first: if you're having trouble using 3ds max, go to a 3dsmax post, or make one! - read the title, it says Softimage XSI v5!



You can download layouts for all sorts of screen resolutions including laptop sizes (1024 by 768). Not sure how it's done exactly - i don't have that problem.

1024 x 768 layouts can be downloaded here: http://www.edharriss.com/xsi/Layout_presets/layouts.htm



Doesn't sound like the best thing in the world then! - perhaps you should download the demo of XSI 4.2 30day trial or Mod tool and try out those character tools instead : Once installed - Open XSI, then select from the side tool bar:
Get > Primitive > Model > Biped Rig. (A ready to go human rig)
Then Get > Primitive > Model > Body - Man. (A ready to go humanoid shaped mesh)
Press 8 to open the scene explorer. Goto the mesh and select it.
Press 2 to switch the animate toolbar.
Select Deform > Envelope > Set envelope with the mesh selected. Click 'yes'.
In explorer select the biped with a click from the middle mouse button. Right click to complete. Rigged human character ready animate. (Press W to tweak the weighting on the mesh with brush tool. Use the weight panel - see bottom left hand corner and an icon with a brush - yeah there are few icons - i can live with them...)
If you want to avoid selecting the mesh when animating in viewports use:
Select man (or what ever the mesh is called.)
Then from right tool bar: Select > Selectability > Toggle selected objects. (Repeat to reselect in viewport - note that you can still select it in the scene explorer.)

Scrub the time slider and select 'auto' icon to start animating. Don't ask ME questions about animating, there are tutorials all over the place (video ones are the best. 3dtutorial.com does some very good video tutorials. And so does the softimage website.)
Try googling "softimage XSI tutorials"...