XSI 6.0

The new version of XSI, Softimage’s entry-level 3D animation and effects package, is now with us, and features impressive new tools and improvements. Although Foundation, reviewed here, is the ‘basic’ version, it is far from basic in capability. In fact it’s comparable to many of the high-end offerings we’ve seen.

Softimage also offers Essentials and Advanced versions, although the difference between these and Foundation is only really noticeable if you are doing full-scale 3D production work that requires features such as the new Delta file referencing and MTOR motion transformation tools. For most, XSI Foundation offers a superbly integrated and comprehensive general purpose 3D toolset.

Version 6 offers improvements to rendering and material management. A new MAT panel gives you quick access to shader layers, plus a rendered preview. The new Material Manager window offers a more detailed editing environment and allows you to create and edit shader libraries, do shader editing with the render tree, and more. There’s also an enlarged shader render window that refreshes while you edit the parameters, which is long overdue.

There are also improvements to animation, animation layering, rendering (core revamp, including support for third-party renderers), the interface, and other additions. Generally the program is better at most things than you’d expect at this price and the update makes it even more so. The only bad news is that we had problems running XSI on Windows XP Pro 64bit on a Mac Pro (not via Bootcamp), but there were no issues on a ‘real’ PC.