3d procedurals in XSI?

[DougNicola]

Are you talking about 3D procedural textures? Yes, XSI has those.

~Doug

[liltbrockie]

Yes it does have a selection... not sure if they are quite as extensive as the ones in 3ds max though..

[valentine]

Indeed, there are one or three procedurals that are terrible to control and that deliver pretty shoddy results :)

[ThE_JacO]

There are more and better coming in v7.
As for hard to control, I agree, pretty shoddy I can't entirely agree with.

XSI lacked a decent fractal noise node first and foremost, but improved Perlin is on its way in v7, and it works with everything, including perparticle particle volumes, so that's sorted :)

[WillBellJr]

There's a XSI symbiont for Darktrees:
http://darksim.com/html/dt25_description.html

I just wish it was more officially supported (and updated)...

-Will

[Benr]

There is also:

http://www.shaders.co.uk/enhance_xsi/

[mocaw]

I can second what Ben has said- I own the enhance XSI set and find them very useful. The developer has some demos on his site along side tutorials.

Coming from LW this was one of the last things I found lacking in XSI since LW has a very robust and easy to use collection of pre-packaged, pay as plugin and free procedural textures.

[Swordsman]

Thanks for all the info guys. I'm really loving XSI for all that it has, I'm just realizing that it's a different duck from other major 3d apps. Can't wait to try out v7 though.:D

[mocaw]

Rumor/theory has it that those transitioning from MAX have the hardest time getting into the XSI work flow. Looks like you're taking well to it though.

[adrencg]

I can second what Ben has said- I own the enhance XSI set and find them very useful. The developer has some demos on his site along side tutorials.

Coming from LW this was one of the last things I found lacking in XSI since LW has a very robust and easy to use collection of pre-packaged, pay as plugin and free procedural textures.

Yes, not only is LW's procedurals literally about 20 times better than XSI's, it's also not a hassle implementing them. You don't need UV's, and they always come out seamless.

That's one area where XSI could watch and learn from LW.

[ThE_JacO]

for the record, very often a spatial projection will give you a decent frameset for a procedural, doesn't take very long to setup (about three clicks including submenu clicks :) ) and doesn't usually seam.

[DecWest]

There is also:

http://www.shaders.co.uk/enhance_xsi/

Enhance XSI is great, some really nice procedurals can be generated REALLY quickly, well worth the $'s

[pooby]

There are more and better coming in v7.

Thank goodness for that. I use them all the time in LW. Lw's procedurals are really very good.

[InfinitySpiral]

Another question is why we still can't see the procedural textures in a viewport......?

[MorBioS]

Wow!!! Will be fantastic if xsi 7 come out with powerful 3d procedurals like LW procedurals.
XSI procedurals is not friendly so much. I´m a LWaver and I love LW 3D procedurals. Few time I need to use UV maps in LW. The LW procedurals works very well for me.
Let´s waiting XSI 7

[mr-doOo]

Wow!!! Will be fantastic if xsi 7 come out with powerful 3d procedurals like LW procedurals.
XSI procedurals is not friendly so much. I´m a LWaver and I love LW 3D procedurals. Few time I need to use UV maps in LW. The LW procedurals works very well for me.
Let´s waiting XSI 7

It just will be the cell and fractal shaders from binary alchemy.

[ThE_JacO]

"just" is a bit of an understatement.
What's important is that there's a fast and reliable noise and compounds.

Most noises and pseudorandom patterning solutions currently worth using are all supersets of Ken Perlin's imporved noise algorithm with a twist, and most of them can be efficiently reproduced in a compound and render blazing fast, or at the very least as fast as a pre-canned compiled shader based on accumulating and tweaking multiple noise functions would.

Water caustic style noise, wood grain of different amplitudes, clouds, hard surface fracturing etc are all done to absolute photoreal level by combining noise functions. The problem used to be massive trees and the fact not everybody knew how to combine such things in the right way, but compounds and community upload solve that issue.

[bobakabob]

Another question is why we still can't see the procedural textures in a viewport......?

You can see visual thumbnails of texture Presets in the Shaders toolbar if you go to Applications > Toolbars > Shaders if this is what you mean. You can drag and drop them onto an object, render region to get instant feedback of what they look like and edit them in the render tree.

It's odd the thumbnails seem so hidden away in the interface, it does seem to cause confusion to people new to XSI. There are some nice ones (though I'm only on XSI 4.2). And yep, LW's procedurals are very powerful and easy to edit. I didn't take to XSI's texturing to begin with but getting to like the workflow more and more.

[Werner]

I never really liked procedural textures that much ( not even the cool LW ones)...you can always spot them a mile away, so, it wasn't a big loss for me when I moved over to XSI.

I still use them from time to time, to break up textures, but the rest is all hand painted. I wish we had a better way of uv unwrapping tho.

[Stoehr]

I wish we had a better way of uv unwrapping tho.


I don't understand. What do you mean? I think unwrapping is a cinch. Unless you're asking for some kind of pelting?

[Werner]

The UV tools in XSI are great, but I was refering to a good pelt like tool.
I use Roadkill now and then, but get unwanted results most of the time. We need something like the UV tools in Modo.

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