Softimage Co., part of Avid Technology Inc., today announced it has begun shipping SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7, the latest version of its professional 3D animation software for games, film and television. Among the packages’ new features is ICE, a transformative open platform that allows artists to explore, learn and modify the robust library of particle-based visual effects and deformation tools available in SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7, or simply build new ones from scratch.
The software will ship with a free training DVD with material provided exclusively for the newest version by Digital-Tutors. Softimage will also offer many ICE tutorials and demonstration videos that will be posted on the SOFTIMAGE|NET community training page at www.softimage.com.
Powering the ICE platform in SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 software will be the GigaCore II, a parallel processing engine that will deliver optimum performance on any modern workstation. Designed from the ground up to take advantage of multi-core workstations, ICE will directly scale with the number and speed of processing cores available. Softimage will also offer numerous pre-built, production-ready ICE “compounds” for particle-based effects and deformations. Customers who create their own ICE compounds can share them in their facility or with the global community on SOFTIMAGE|NET, in either an open XML format or a locked binary file to protect their intellectual property.
Other new features of SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 inclde 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 is a major update to the lightweight referencing system in SOFTIMAGE|XSI, with enhanced support for clusters and cluster properties, including materials, textures and UVs. A new Real-Time Shading architecture will allow fragment and vertex shaders to exist in one node, and will be programmable and controllable from any ICE attribute.
SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 is now available for purchase from a local Softimage reseller or sales representative, or on the Softimage Web store at http://www.softimage.com/buy/. SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 Essentials carries a suggested retail price of $2,995 and SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 Advanced lists for $4,995. All Softimage customers and 3D enthusiasts can join the SOFTIMAGE|NET community site, where a dedicated forum is in place to post and share member-created ICE compounds.
