Help - Softimage Coding/scripting Books???`

[Mechis]

3d quakers has two and 3dtutorial has one.
~Mechis

[Omita]

Thanks... they look like they are pretty basic stuff.

http://www.xsi-blog.com/

has some stuff... but over all I am still hunting for some more intermediate and advance help.

[Loolarge]

I was wondering why there are so few resources about XSI programming, but i guess the reason is that the SDK is fairly well documented and comes with many examples.

[CiaranM]

The Scripting tutorial at 3Dtutorial.com is top notch stuff and will teach you more than you'll need to know to get started and then some...it starts off slow, but if you feel like it, skip the first chapter and get to business.

[Strang]

ya helge's dvds are top notch... and he is now a developer at softimage so that helps promote the videos.

there aren't many books because softimage doesn't use a proprietary language so syntax and such can be found easily by finding a book on vbscript,jscript, or python.

the other reason is, i dont think anyone has the time to do so.

[Omita]

Despite the docs it's taking a long time to get something written inside of XSI. Just walking the subnodes isn't very intuitive. What is nice is in Maya you can find out what setting are Readable, Writable, and Querry able. I am having trouble just finding out if an subNode exists in XSI. It's not really all the intuitive but I haven't gotten too far into the docs.

[Strang]

in the docs there are two sections rarely ever used by people starting... i know cause i didn't use them either ;)

Plug-in Development

a sepcific page from this section...
http://softimage.wiki.avid.com/sdkdocs/dev_navigate.htm

from here you keep reading to the next page and you get selections,working with params, working with return values,operators,etc

second section is...

Script Development

http://softimage.wiki.avid.com/sdkdocs/script_intro.htm

important section here is the "Understanding Error Messages"

when using the search tab in the documentation, sort by location, and only look at "SDK Documentation".. this always goes to script realted version of the function or method. from there you can get to related c++ classes, the object hierarchy, and inheritance. object hierarchy and inheritance can help you understand a lot about xsi...

other than these you need to just ask questions...

steven

[CoolCalb]

another thing you might want to do, is subscribe to the official XSI mailing list.
in the last few years it became very scripting oriented, a lot of scripting knowledge
is being "transfered" between people there, and of course you can ask specific questions.

Some of guys there, also write here, but I think there are many others with a lot of knowledge,
who raerly come here, plus official XSI programmers are there, and can help with questions too.

[Sbowling]

You may want to check out XSIBase.com. They have a whole forum section related to coding and just searching through there may help you find the answers you need.

[ShadowM8]

I just want to give another nod to Helge's DVD. It's a great resource. As for SDK for most stuff I find it very intuative. There are a few sections like scripted ops, geometry operators and ppg development that are vage and all over the place, which is partly due to bad design of those features to begin with. But overall if you spend some time doing a couple of scripts you will become very comfortable with the SDK.
This being said I am infavor of creating a XSI centric book along the lines of those books available for maya. Last I remember there was some talk on the mailing list on people collaborating on such a project.

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