The creators of Softimage XSI set out to make a 3D animation package made for artists, by artists and it can create some stunning art! Whether you’re a beginner or an advanced artist who wants to do everything using one program, Softimage XSI has everything you need, even with its most basic program, Foundation. You’re given the capability to do all your modeling, rigging, animation, and rendering in one package with little need to jump around, and even then Softimage XSI 6.02 Foundation (which I will hereby be shortening to: SX6.02F) makes it painless to travel back and forth. SX6.02F is an extremely competent package, whatever stage in your artistic endeavors you are.
SX6.02F goes to great pains to be as well organized as it can possibly be, and this is its major advantage over the competition. On the surface, many 3D applications have an air of being a mishmash of panels and dials that do specific jobs, yet they feel separate and disjointed. However, with SX6.02F, you notice almost immediately how clearly each operation is defined in a cohesive, interlocking system. Each area has a strong sense of hierarchy, which insures that all components can be easily accessed, used, or modified when needed. Because of that organization, it is easy to access those elements through another project, without damaging the original. Considering that computer-generated art can have so many extraneous parts and pieces, having a program that keeps it all in order is a very welcome advantage.
The people that use Softimage XSI are wide and varied, from designers of popular, high-end video games at major studios to one person working on an animated short; XSI has been used in every situation. For aspiring filmmakers, who want to create their own animated films, SX6.02F is an affordable all-in-one package. Fortunately, even if you’ve been trained on a different software package, SX6.02F offers some helpful, transitional options to help you get acclimated to the new environment. It has a slightly different way of approaching the problem of creation, but is not so difficult, so you can ease your way in and pick up the workflow over time.
Main menu.
Ease of Use
Whether you’re a beginner in 3D or have varying degrees of experience, SX6.02F is really no harder or easier than the other triple-A packages out today. As I mentioned before, even if you have cut your teeth on a different package, you’ll find that the basic workflow isn’t drastically unfamiliar from what you are used to. Keyboard shortcuts, contextual menus, and easily accessible panels offer multiple alternatives for how you go about interacting with your model. In several ways, SX6.02F shares common ground with other popular packages, but in the places where it does differ, SX6.02F makes its own rules to bolster its own strengths. That’s a very smart thing to do, however it does fall to the user to learn its subtle variances and adapt. However, that comes with the nature of this industry and SX6.02F does a good job of easing the mental shift into its environment.
The layout of SX6.02F is clean and concise with no unnecessary frills. It has your standard four panel view ports for perspective and orthographic views for modeling. To the right side of your view ports you have transform controls, on the bottom there are the timeline controls, and finally to the left a “contextual” toolbar that can be changed, based upon which area of SX6.02F that you need to work in. By accessing the top most panel, you have the option of switching between Model, Animate, Render, and Simulate. Upon updating this top panel, all the menus below will change to reveal tools and operations that are associated with their respective menu. This is extremely helpful to have all your related operations visibly in the forefront and organized naturally under their proper jurisdictions. And any actions done under a certain menu are recorded in the objects history and can be accessed through the Explore panel. It’s this type of organization that helps (down the line) when you start to pull your assets together for your work’s final condensation.
The XSI menus offer different modes for specific tasks.
For users who are new to SX6.02F, there are certain aspects of modeling in SX6.02F that feel intuitive and some parts that feel awkward with initial interaction. However, you should expect as much when you’re first introduced to a new workflow with its own perspective on how the work should be carried out. Creating primitives is as easy as selecting from its appropriate panel from the toolbar, which then displays a panel for defining its transform properties. Then you can go about modeling by using the transform options along the right side of your screen. Though it is good to have all the essential functions out there in the open for you, it can be cumbersome to have to click on each option every time you want to move something different. This is where relying heavily on knowing the shortcuts for your most basic vertex, edge, and polygon face modifications is a necessity. Unfortunately, these are laid out in such a way that there is a huge gap on your keyboard between those keys and your Move, Scale, and Rotate tool shortcuts. This is very frustrating because it causes the User to have to constantly look at the keyboard, because not all the essential modeling tools are all within fingers reach of one hand. Luckily, the multi-purpose Move Component tool that is part of SX6.02F allows you to have access to all three modes, with that one tool, in order to quickly tweak your creation. With that, an artist can quickly work without jumping around from tool to tool like most programs make you do.
