Thinking about Softimage

#1

I have been testing the trial of Softimage today, and I am quite experienced in Lightwave, Cinema4D and Blender. So far I found the opengl view to be excellent, but the fun is marred by extremely slow general operations, such as duplicating objects, and general object editing, when dealing with complex scenes.

Overall, it feels very… slow in operation. Selection also lags quite a bit when dealing with more complex objects (around 1~3 million vertices per object). Mind, I am looking for a 3d app that can handle thousands of objects with ease in a scene.

Thoughts? Am I better off with something else?

Hardware: i920@3.6ghz, 48gb, 7970 3gb, revodrive x3

#2

I am surprised by your problems.
CTRL+D duplicates an object or what is your specific case/need?

The selection issue is also strange with your excellent setup.

In general Softimage is better with heavy objects than with thousands of light objects so if you can merge them it is better.
If you have made many modifications in an object that remains in its history until you freeze or freeze modeling.

#3

I am a Softimage user who made the move from Lightwave last year. All I can say is that if you have only played with Softimage for a day, that is not enough!

There are just different ways of doing things in Softimage that are in general more efficient than Lightwave once you get used to them.

Give it at least a week and do some tutorials before making your mind up.

#4

Softimage normally deals very well with heavy objects (as in large numbers of polys). There were issues with drivers for the amd cards giving selection delays with large numbers of points but I was under the impression they had been solved. Might be worth trying a slightly older driver version?

#5

Yup there has been some issues with selection on ATI cards I think. You should check out latests drivers ect. Overall SI is one of the best with heavy scenes.

#6

Thanks for the feedback. I am planning to keep at it for the next couple of weeks, and see how it goes.

#7

He has a new card so he shouldn’t have any problems.

Relevant thread:
http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=9;action=display;threadid=45465;start=225

#8

I don’t even think 2 weeks is enough. I’m a former Lightwave user also, and after being with Softimage for a few years now, I can tell you that LW is a toy compared to SI. You need months to discover the depth.

#9

@hvanderwegen it might be helpful to look in the object properties for anything in the stack there. usually with heavy scenes of objects, things can be very slow for two main reason:
First is the stack, you need to freeze it every once and a while if your not planning to amend anything procedurally. This is a problem with all procedural systems, even with Houdini.

The second thing you might want to check is the undo level. if your working with thousands of objects and the poly counts is in the millions, then don’t crank your undo levels allot. in fact i find my self sometimes disabling undo altogether until i finish editing what I want, then i get it back on.

Hope this helps.

Best

#10

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