Since its acquisition from Avid in 2008, Autodesk has not slowed down in adding to the already robust toolset known as Softimage. Along with Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya, Autodesk Softimage rounds out the 3 most popular professional 3D packages on the market today. Completely standalone, Softimage is fully capable of modeling, rigging, animation, dynamics, and beautiful renders, with the added bonus of fitting nicely in a pipeline with the other 3D software applications. A powerful program, Autodesk Softimage offers users more than sufficient reason to try it out and enjoy what it can do.
Softimage has always retained a clean interface with tons of options buried within.
Autodesk Softimage offers some unique capabilities both in front and behind the scenes. The GigaCore 3D engine that powers the rendering of high-density polygons and subdiv surfaces by taking advantage of multi-core CPUs and 64-bit systems. The nondestructive workflow within Softimage allows users to make changes to assets from anywhere in its history without ruining your work or having to rebuild it from scratch. The Interactive Creative Environment (ICE) is a node-based environment where artists can create simple or complex effects and dynamics visually without having to rely solely on scripting it out. Nonlinear animation and mixing allows animators to have extensive control over their show, mix it down, and save out libraries of clips to reuse later. On top of all this, and much more, Softimage can export any of that data to be used in programs like Autodesk Maya, to compleiment an existing pipeline or provide a smooth transition to this toolset.
Modeling operations within Softimage have been updated for better results.
Ease of Use
Softimage's layout of its interface is really lean on the surface, but conceals a lot of extended functionality. Like most programs, to really get a handle on working within Softimage, artists will have to explore the menus, buttons, and toggles to familiarize themselves with the way certain sections are organized. Very little iconography is used to give users an at-a-glance understanding of tool functionality, but that will not hinder the curious from jumping in and clicking to see what results turn up. Getting accustomed to the different menus and modes of Softimage will take a little time, but the benefits of going through the process outweigh the cost of entry.
Over a 100 new mental ray shaders have been added to Softimage.
The different modes within Autodesk Softimage can be broken down into Model, Animate, Render, ICE, Simulate, and Hair. Switching to any one of these modes will focus the left-side menu to that particular discipline. The right-side panel provides a visual means of transforming and modifying selected objects in the viewport. Alt-clicking an object can open a contextual menu with operations that pertain to the type of object you have selected. Any changes that are made to an asset can be updated through the history stack whether it's just at the modeling stage or has passed through rigging all the way to animation. Having this level of freedom throughout the artistic process is unprecedented and what makes Softimage unique.
Depth of Features
Softimage has now been condensed down into one package with a Standalone or Network licensing. So whether you are a single user or part of a production team, everyone gets the same feature set. Feedback initiatives like the Check for Announcements and Updates, Crash Error Reporting, and the Customer Involvement Program allow Autodesk and its users to be aware of news about Softimage and what problems may be occurring on an individual's computer.
A few changes have been made to the Viewport Slate. Tokens and templates can be used to create a viewport slate with defined cameras and template information displayed in the viewport. Objects can now be set to partial or full transparency in the viewport to aid artists that are trying to organize their scene. The XRay Shading mode can also aid in modifying the display of everything in the viewport making it see-through. Auto keying Camera Navigation allows for continuous rotations that span more than 180 degrees between frames. For objects in the scene, local ambient lighting can be applied to a single object as well as a group. Finally, bone primitives can be created to be used in ICE-based animation.
TD's can use ICE's versatile node environment and incorporate custom strings to build effects.
A couple of updates have been added for the modelers. Boolean operations have been overhauled to process faster and be much more stable. The polygon modeling tools now handle internal edges better than in previous versions. Symmetrize polygons now mirrors the internal edges and Invert Polygons no longer flips internal edges.
A few helpful operations have been added to UV Texture Editor. UV's can now be set as non-editable so that other UV sets can be selected and arranged without interrupting the ones that are in their proper place.
Copying and pasting UVs have been made better when transferring to symmetric copies or if the UVs have been re-indexed. The Unfold property has a couple new operations for better calculation of unraveling an object based on the cut line while keeping the arrangement of the other UV shells unmoved.
In Animation, f-curves and their tangents can be set to be altered or unaltered when the animation layers are collapsed. The animation of an object can be changed or left alone depending on which one you pick. The Craft Director Studio Plugin has been bundled in with this version of Softimage. Craft Director streamlines your animation by giving users real-time camera controls, realistic simulations for vehicles and props, and other helpful controls for real-time recording, interaction, and depth orientation.
ICE kinematics lets riggers use the power of ICE to build complex rigs without all the extra helper objects cluttering around the mesh.
Face Robot allows animators to create realistic facial animation more efficiently. The new lip sync tool analyzes audio files for the phonemes, then maps the sound to the corresponding viseme pose of the mouth in your facial rig. A great starting off point for building verbal performances. The Game Export settings have been updated with new texture map types added, building real-time shaders for game mesh, and an option to delete the existing shader when rebuilding the skin shader.
The ICE kinematics provides a means for animators and riggers to take advantage of a powerful tool to create advanced rigs. Instead of creating complex helper objects for your manipulators and transforms, riggers can leverage ICE to handle the unique transforms keeping the main rig leaner. String data is now supported in ICE attributes for custom nodes. Springs and Dampers are now available for ICE Rigid Body simulation.
Softimage now uses Dynamic shader architecture that allow for a more dynamic integration of custom shaders. Over a 100 new shaders have been added to the mental ray shader library under this new architecture as well. All these shaders support new data types for their input and output ports like 2D Vector, 3x3 matrix, etc. that are all color coded for easy identification. Softimage now parses CgFX and DXFX shaders.
Cameras in Softimage now support multi-camera passes that allow users to render multiple cameras in a single pass. The grouped cameras are rendered from each individual point of view. Lens Shaders can be applied to the camera's lens shader stack and have input ports added dynamically.
A lot of the mental ray shaders now make use of light lists. These light lists allow artists to designate which lights will have an effect on a given shader. Flat lights, Area lights, and IES Lights have been added to the lights available in Softimage as well. The softness of shadows can be tweaked with the new Raytraced Soft Shadows that effect the quality of the blurred edges.
Softimage's mental ray Renderer has been updated for 2011 to be compatible with Maya and 3ds Max 2011. The Render Slate lets users plug in tokens to display custom rendering information with the rendered image sequence.
Crosswalk 5.0 offers cross-platform transferal of Softimage assets to 3ds Max 2009-2011 and Maya 8.5 to 2011. Within its own family line, Crosswalk goes back as far as Softimage version 7. Lastly, for those that are familiar with using the FBX format, the SDK has been updated to 2011.
Face Robot is an amazing tool that helps speed up the facial performances of your characters.
Performance
Softimage 2011 handles high-density meshes due to the Gigacore Architecture. This multithreaded architecture is capable of rendering billions of subdivision surface polygons of multiple objects. Large scenes with complex objects are able to be imported at a faster rate. It also helps when animating thousands of objects with high polygon counts for more efficient processing of the moving data. The new Cache Manager gives animators a way to save animation deformations and simulations into a point cache file to be loaded back later. Features like these within Softimage really go a long way to help artists do high-end work with less down time.
F-curve editor is where animators can tweak their animation.
Value
Softimage 2011 is a powerful program with an efficient workflow and operations. Having the ability to do modeling, rigging, texture, lighting, animation, etc., in one convenient package is a huge plus when trying to figure out what software package you want to invest in. If you are serious about having a 3D software package that can render professional results, the good news is that Softimage can more than accomplish it. For a single user that is only dabbling in 3D, this is a bit costly to just mess around in. Taking advantage of a trial or student version would be a good place to start in case users need to try before they buy. But if you plan on working professionally, you have the assurance that this package is widely known and used throughout the entertainment industry and is only gaining more ground.
Final Comments The last few iterations of Softimage have brought with it big advancements as well as smaller refinements to give users a very stable and balanced piece of software. This current version has more behind the scene changes, nothing as big as when ICE became available, but still warrant attention, especially for artists that have not jumped on the Softimage bandwagon. For those that are already familiar with the software, but have a version that is more then 2 versions back, you may seriously consider upgrading just for having features like ICE alone. Lastly, for artists that have already been using other major software packages like Maya and 3ds Max, Softimage has gone to great lengths to make sure that work is easily transferable between applications. With features like these within Softimage 2011, choosing to work in this program will be a very profitable decision.
Ease
of Use
8.0
Depth
of Options
10.0
Performance
10.0
Value
vs. Cost
10.0
Overall Score
9.5
Michael Muwanguzi is a graphic artist and web designer currently living in Los Angeles, CA. Apart from working on print ads, web-related advertising, and 3D design work, he is currently working on new film production work and is designing a 3D adventure game from scratch.
Since its acquisition from Avid in 2008, Autodesk has not slowed down in adding to the already robust toolset known as Softimage. Along with Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya, Autodesk Softimage rounds out the 3 most popular professional 3D packages on the market today. Completely standalone, Softimage is fully capable of modeling, rigging, animation, dynamics, and beautiful renders, with the added bonus of fitting nicely in a pipeline with the other 3D software applications. A powerful program, Autodesk Softimage offers users more than sufficient reason to try it out and enjoy what it can do.
