Softimage Announces XSI 7 with ICE

[NewsHottie]

Forum: CG News
Posted By: Leonard
Post Time: 07-07-2008 at 11:16 AM
Text:



Hi guys,

It's a big day. We're announcing XSI 7.

XSI 7 introduces ICE (Interactive Creative Environment), a groundbreaking technology that transforms XSI from just another 3D product into a powerful and flexible open platform.

ICE - New in XSI 7
ICE (Interactive Creative Environment) is an open, scalable platform that allows anyone to extend the capabilities of XSI quickly and intuitively using a node-based dataflow diagram. This paradigm means that 3D artists can create complex 3D effects and tools extremely quickly without writing code. Powering ICE is a high performance parallel processing engine that takes advantage of multi-core workstations – a first for a general 3D architecture – giving users utmost performance and scalability. The result is a giant leap forward in production efficiency and consistency, enabling higher production standards.

The ICE environment – XSI functionality is displayed using a node-based dataflow diagram. Each node has specific capabilities. Users connect nodes to create a desired effect. A group of nodes can be packaged together into a “compound”, which is displayed as a single node. As a result, highly complex tools can be deployed and re-used without writing code.

More New Features

• Support for mental ray v.3.6 with new rendering ‘stand-ins’ that will allow users to offload objects along with rigged and animated characters to the disk until render time, resulting in light-weight scene assembly for much larger rendered scenes, and optimized controls for final gathering and global illumination
• Delta II a major update to the lightweight referencing system in SOFTIMAGE|XSI, with enhanced support for clusters and cluster properties, including materials, textures and UVs
• RTS III -- a new Real-Time Shading architecture that will allow fragment and vertex shaders to exist in one node, and will be programmable and controllable from any ICE attribute
• And more...

XSI 7 will ship this quarter (before 30 September 2008). A demo will be available soon for download.

>> SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7