does it make it worse than 3ds max and maya for freelancer?
Lack of plugins for XSI
Jesse-Irvin
#2
Over the years Softimage has implemented many things that may have been puglins into it’s standard toolset.
Places where you may normally find or want a plugin work quite well out of the box in Softimage.
A robust poly modeling toolset
The new UVlayout tool now built into Softimage
ICE for deformation and particle work
The recent addition of Face Robot
A built in albeit a dated node based compositor
softimage hair
softimage cloth
syflex cloth
Not to mention that there have been many plugins that have popped up since ICE has been a part of the software. The EM suite of plugis from Mootzoid comes to mind covering fluids, particle rendering, and a particle and geometry meshing plugin. The new MB feather tools that look pretty sweet. T-Gen 2 was recently released for tree generation.
On the free side theres the SMP fluids for ICE, aa-Ocean, dual quaternion skinning (theres a non ICE version as well around though it can be pretty slow) and loads of other little compunds that are easy to implement and apply in ice to do all sorts of things.
There has been several hair plugins for ICE, not to mention that Softimage hair is built from joe alters shave and a hair cut plugin and is still a pretty decent solution,
On the rendering side we have 3delight, Arnold Render is on its way and I believe V-Ray is on it’s way? and I know theres a few other 3rd party renderers that i can’t recall
Theres also a wide range of plugins, add-ons and scripts that are around. Some of these are obsolete or have been implemented into Softimage directly but theres a lot of them out there. The biggest challenge with Softimage in regards to plugins and add-ons can be finding them. But CGTalk is a good start
These may not seem like a lot of plugins compared to other packages I find out of the box Softimage is a very very capable and complete package. Theres plugins around but for the most part I find I rarely need them. That said ICE has really opened Softimage up. It’s been around for a little over a year and in that year we have seen plenty of amazing things. Hair, cloth, feathers, 2 fluid solvers, a mesher, Tessendorf ocean waves, a particle renderer. Ive seen tests for breaking apart objects. and thats not to mention what you can learn to do on your own with ICE, rippling waves as geo moves through it, creating plants (I saw a pretty neat tutorial on that a little while ago.), flocking, basic and probably some pretty complex crowd simulation, all sorts of particle and geometry effects.
In the future theres even more promising development as Autodesk is hopefully not too far from supporting ICE kinematics for animation (I love Softimage’s animation toolset and enhancing it’s already solid and easy to understand rigging tools will be amazing, theres some videos of the things that can be done with ICE kinematics already around.) Not to mention the ability to create and destroy geometry down the road, allowing for some amazing control for effects and even enhancing the core modeling toolset (fingers still crossed)
In the end some software I find need plugins to really do what I want it to, this is usually fine for me as I do my research and am able to find what I need. it’s usually free to boot so it’s not a big deal to download a bunch of plugins to get things going. This isn’t really the Case for Softimage however, it’s a great tool out of the box and can really do just about anything without the need for any plugins. That said, plugins do exist and theres more coming out all the time.
ximage
#3
yeh also a good place to find some free addons/plugins is http://rray.de/xsi/
the dude that host this is awesome and i am forever using this site to find cool things for XSI!
and also all the stuff Jesse-Irvin said is valid!
Sween
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