Hallo,
I am currently evaluating XSI/Modtool.
Is it possible to see and change the absolute dimensions of objects and components? I can only find the scale tool but this only shows me the translation matri scale (usally 1,1,1). Thanks in advance.
cheers,
Matthias
what you mean with “absolute dimension”?
On the right side you have the Transform panel with the input for SRT, you select what you want and type the value in there. Or you manipulate in the 3d view activating the mode you want (shortcut XCV for SRT)
If you want absolute collapsing you might need to activate transform>Collapse Points for Snapping/Absolute Translation and maybe “Transform Components independently in Local Mode”.
I’m not sure what you want so take a look here too http://community.softimage.com/forumdisplay.php?f=65
specially this http://community.softimage.com/showthread.php?t=495
and this http://community.softimage.com/showthread.php?t=503
I think he wants to know how you get the size of an object, ie it’s length/width/height.
I’ve never needed this information, so I can’t answer this… What I do know is you can get the volume and surface area by pressing in Edit->Info Selection (Shift+Enter).
Also, if you select a component, it will tell you it’s position in global space. So if your model was centered to the world, you could select the top-most point, and “translate Y” would be it’s height.
thanks for the info but I think I was not clear enough as for what I want. I just want to know and change the size in units of my model or selected components. Please look at the attached pictures, I am using Cinema4D. There you can see and change the size in units in the coordinate manager. Is this possible in XSI?
cheers,
Matthias
They are just arbitrary units, you can call them whatever you want - cm, mm, km, bananas.
XSI doesn’t really use real world units and this is a topic of some debate. However, there does seem to be some agreement that 1 XSI unit = 10 cm.
See here:
http://community.softimage.com/showthread.php?t=2018&highlight=units
Thanks but you misunderstood me, I want the amount/number/vlaue of units. I want to know if my object/component is for example 3 units wide, 5 units high and 4 units deep. In XSI I currently only see 1/1/1 in the scale tool. What i basically want to do is for example I have a polygon selected, this will be a window. The window should have a size of 30x50x0 units. How can I change the size of the polygon to exactly these dimensions?
cheers,
Matthias
You should be building everything in the center of the world, and then moving it into place, that’s the best approach for this kind of precision, and it’ll allow you to see how wide/high your objects are, because their center will be 0/0/0.
You can also build curve guides, sort of like rulers, with all your commonly used dimensions there, and then move that around, duplicate it, and use it as a snapping guide.
As far as I know, XSI doesn’t output these values by default.
That’s not how XSI works, you can only type absolute translation of points, translation and rotation of polys and edges.
You can’t type scale of components. However you can use operators to adjust their size. Like the Inset, Offset polygons, and the extrude that already has it’s own inset operations.
This doesn’t make a difference for me. But lots of people have been requesting units and precision tools, so hopefully Softimage will address this.
That said, you could use ICE attributes to see your units and make conversions.
If you have access to XSI 7 you can try ICE and access all sorts of attributes. And units are nothing else then a scale for these values, assigning a name to it.
Even if XSI don’t have units, it’s not like they just throw any scale in there. Everything is based on the grid size, 1 SI unit = 10cm as already mentioned on this thread.
Example of how you can visualize component data using ICE:
[img]http://www.thiagocosta.net/temp/ICE_Units.jpg[/img]It’s a major flaw in XSI’s core design as far as I am concerned and the reason why I no longer bother to model in XSI when precision is required (which is often). Enough excuses, this really does need to be fixed (IMHO). BTW - it’s little things like this that turn a lot of users off to XSI.
J
I think Softimage is mostly concentrating on improving the pipelines of big FX houses, and and TD’s. Which is not a bad thing, if you’re a TD or a big FX house. But as a result there have not been many big improvements in the area’s used by the CG grunt on a daily basis, like modeling, UV’s and such.
ICE is very cool, but I think it’s a good example of an impovement that will mostly make XSI much more open to TD’s and it will speed up the process of writing in house tools for specific tasks. Ordinary self employed all rounders, with a medium sized brain like me, will hardly benefit from it, or they will have to dive in deep and invest a lot of time. Which is something that comes with the territory, but there’s only 24 hours in a day…
That’s far far from being a core flaw.
It would be a core flaw if they had designed XSI based on cm, inches, feet or whatever you come up with.
They have units and it's called SI units. That's how they measure things. Just because it's not explicitly a metric system, it doesn't mean they don't take scale into consideration.
A light falloff is based on SI units, object size is based on the same thing, bone length, everything is based on SI units.
Both the physX and ODE dynamics are using 1 Softimage unit equal to 10 cm.
If you look the gravity node it's set to 98.1. If you model things with the scale of 1 SI = 1m, you will need to set the gravity to 9.81. Therefore your light falloff length and everything else will need to fit the same scale.
Real world units would be just a way to convert these existing scale.
The problem is that people want to make sure they have a "rule" going on, and a "cm" or something like that on the side of scalar inputs.
I could be wrong but I believe if they add units into XSI it would be a conversion layer between core data and user inputs.
Another example of how you can use ICE and units... take a look on my kinetic energy node [http://www.vimeo.com/1455513](http://www.vimeo.com/1455513)
It calculates Mass and the Velocity vector. the output is in joules (the default scale for Kinetic Energy).
In the image bellow I just added the name “Kg” and “Meters/Second” to my attributes.
The equation KE = 1/2 (M * (V * V)) outputs the scalar value in Joules, and as you can see the results are precise. Just look my image and try the same values in the kinetic calculator http://www.csgnetwork.com/kineticenergycalc.html
Now if I want to say that my 1 Joule is in "foot-pound force", "electronvolt" or a "British thermal unit", I can just convert it.
For example, the smallest particle in the picture bellow, has 0.1221 grams, is traveling at 2.4 meters per second and it's kinetic energy is 0.3765 Joule.
To make things easy, 1 joule = 1 newton metre = 1 watt second, so I'm gonna round this up and say that my little particle has 0.3 watt of kinetic energy, and my fellow engineer would be happy.
This is just an example of how units can work.
As I said, they didn't added real world units as a feature in XSI, and I believe they are gonna take care of that, as lots and lots of people have been asking to.
[img]http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=132816&stc=1[/img]
[b]
[u] Question:[/u][/b]
What would you like to see in XSI that make use of a unit system?
Would you be changing your units in the middle of the work? If yes, would you expect that XSI rescale all your data? (AFAIK this is the only thing that could be an issue).
What you want to do if a model that used Meters is merged in a scene that is using Feet?
I remember 3dsmax exploding rigged characters with this thing… “Adopt system unit scale” and bam!
The question was not about specified units, but just getting a read-out of how many units a certain object or component occupies in X, Y and Z.
I know I asked this very same question when I started fiddling around with XSI 6 as well, and there was no solution at that time either.
Most people are probably completely satisfied with the concept of SI units, I know I am, but there are times when you’d still want a simple mechanism somewhere that would allow you to just find out how big that object is, or how tall that polygon is, without having to count gridlines or place things at 0,0,0. Even if you decide that one SI unit equals the length of a banana, you still might occasionally need to know exactly how many bananas wide your model is.
It’s hardly rocket science, but still there’s apparently no way to get that info out of a vanilla XSI install.
That said, XSI is a great app, but it’s a bit strange that this simple thing is nowhere to be found.
Well, I strongly disagree… in my opinion it is a fundamental flaw in the design of XSI – if it were not then a fix would be easy to implement, which it is not.
Really, I don’t care about this enough to get into a debate over it but I think it’s unlikely that this issue will be fixed anytime soon because I’ve been using the software since the Softimage 3D 2.x days and the problem was an issue then and it’s an issue now and it’s never been sorted out… so forgive me but I’m not going to hold my breath on this one 
Like I said, the XSI modeler is not designed with precision modelling in mind, if you need that it’s best to use another application which can provide this functionality. As I pointed out, most professional level 3D applications do provide this and the fact that XSI does not at this point in time only goes to prove my point this is a core design flaw and once again places XSI outside of the mainstream. XSI zealots can make endless excuses about why it’s ok or not needed but at the end of the day users will decide to invest in applications that provide them with the tools that they need when the need them.
That’s my view on the issue and I’m sticking to it.
Let’s hope that Softimage does the right thing and fixes this properly so that we don’t need to have this conversation any longer.
Peace
J
Thanks guys, shame that there is no easy way to do this in XSI. I would have thought this is a piece of cake for XSI.
cheers,
Matthias
Nipples instead of feet, thank you 
This is not the issue at all. Any unit system is fine, as long as we can read out and adjust the actual size of an object, a component like a selected polygon or an edge.
Right now there is no way ( I know of ) a user can see how big a polygon is or typing in an exact size anywhere in XSI.
If you don’t do any exact modeling you might think it’s not a biggie. But it’s not so hard to understand that some users would benefit from a feature like that a lot.
but that’s me…
It’s a bizarre concept TBH. The main problem comes from the fact that every other 3D app has the concept of ‘real’ units of measurement that helps a user visualise and negotiate their 3D space using ‘real’ world scale as a reference point.
An SI unit (10cm) is as ‘real’ as a MAX unit or a Maya unit (which could be mm,cm,m etc) the only problem is we dont use .1m as a day to day measurement tool.
I don’t think the SI system is a major flaw. I do think the ommision of a conventional measurement system in an otherwise very user friendly package is somewhat strange.
Would it be possible to create a simple script to ‘convert’ the SI unit of measurement into something more paletable and user friendly? SI<>M shouldnt be more than a decimal point movement ?
Just to re-iterate, this discussion is not about units. It was just about the current size of objects and components in the same way as you can access position and rotation.
cheers,
Matthias
I’ve asked this same thing some 4 years ago…Coming from LW I’ve adapted pretty well to the SI Units concept…what I could not adapt to however is the lack of dimensioning tools for XSI’s weirdo unit system. They force us to use their own system and then they provide no tools for it! (and please don’t start me with those hackarounds of using constrained nulls, etc.
Best thing I did was dumping XSI altogether in architectural modeling and started using Sketchup! What used to take hours can now be acomplished in minutes!
So, as others said, if you need precison modeling use something else and, if you later import it into XSI to texture and render, just pray that the client doesn’t request changes.