Softimage 2012

What's New in Softimage 2012

New features in Softimage 2012 include:

• ICE Modeling: Create procedural geometry in the Interactive Creative Environment (ICE) based on a set of rules, conditions, and parameters. 
• Enhanced Everyday Workflows: Enjoy greater overall productivity and ease of use, with across-the-board enhancements. The Texture Editor, Explorer, Schematic View, Scene Layer Manager, Render Tree, Bone Primitive, Reference Models, and Weight Editor have all received attention. 
• Syflex on ICE: Use the power of ICE to achieve greater control and flexibility over Syflex cloth simulations. 
• UV Unfolding: Save time and effort with new UV relaxing and pinning options. 
• Lagoa Multiphysics: More easily achieve plastic, liquid, soft-body, cloth, and foam-like effects. 
• Stereoscopic Support: Take advantage of the trend for 3D films with an in-viewport stereoscopic viewer offering a range of display modes and stereopscopic camera rig. 
• Single-Step Suites Interoperability: More easily take advantage of the focused toolsets in the Autodesk® Entertainment Creation Suites Premium 2012, with new single-step interoperability between Softimage and Autodesk® Maya®, Autodesk® 3ds Max®, and Autodesk®Mudbox™ software. 
• ICE FX Builder: Create and modify sophisticated effects more quickly and easily, with the help of the new ICE FX Builder. 
• ICE Subframe Sampling: Calculate collisions more accurately in ICE simulations, with new support for subframe sampling on a per-object or per-point cloud basis. 
• Vector Displacement Map Support: You can use mental ray® rendering technology to render complex high-resolution details created in Mudbox 2012 software or certain other applications on low-resolution geometry. 
• New ICE Compounds, Preset FX, Shaders, and Model Library: More easily create a wide range of effects and rendered looks in ICE with the help of new compounds, shaders, and pre-defined ICE FX that can be used “as-is”, or customized as required. 
• Maya nCache Support: More easily transport geometry and ICE simulations between Softimage and Maya 2012 software. 
• Consistent F-Curve Editor: More easily switch between multiple products in the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites Premium thanks to an updated F-Curve Editor that provides a toolset that offers more consistent functionality and terminology for editing animation curves. 
• Polygonizer: Build liquid and blobby effects with the new Polygonizer toolset. 
• SDK Enhancements and Events: Facilities can now more easily customize and extend their tools and pipelines, with the exposure of more core Softimage services and events: Undo Bracketing, onCommand Events, and onRenderPass Events. 
• Softimage Composite: Softimage® Composite toolset offers keying, tracking, color correction, raster and vector paint, rotoscoping, warping, advanced filters, a full 3D compositing environment, and tools that help support stereoscopic productions. 
• MatchMover Professional Camera Tracking: Extract 3D camera and motion data from video and film sequences in order to insert CG elements into a live-action scene. 
• FBX 2012: Through support for the Autodesk® FBX® 2012 asset exchange technology, artists can transfer stereo camera rigs, vector displacement maps, multiple UVs, and subframe samples for icecache and PC2 in and out of Softimage, making it easier to safely pass production assets between products. 

A set of new view videos can viewed now over at the Softimage blog.

Grow Rig System - Autorigger for Softimage

Chris Covelli recently posted at the si-community forums about his new Softimage autorigger, which is in beta.


Not only is it an auto-rig for rigging components but it also provides and then manipulates a base mesh for the character. It's an extremely promising plugin.


An introductory video can be found here.


Check out the continuing discussion here.

pmG's Messiah:Studio - Dare To Share ™ $10 Challenge

Yep. If you've not heard about it by now, where have you been?

pmG are offering Messiah:Studio for $10 and $40 respectively.

Yes, that is $40 instead of $1195.

When the progress bar gets to the end, its over. Make sure you don't miss out!

Go here to find out more.

EDIT: The Challenge was met!

Congratulations !

We Dared. You Shared. You won.

February 14th 2011

114 Countries. 35,000 hits. 103,000 combined views. Multiple records broken.

In 7 days you have left your mark on the history of the internet, and made a lot of people happy

Congrats to everyone who entered!

Pooby's ICE Tutorials

Paul Smith has recently uploaded several very informative ICE tutorials, further expanding peoples understanding of just how flexible and near-all encompassing ICE is for solving general 3d problems. Here's a couple of notable ones:

11: Making a displacement viewing tool from Paul smith on Vimeo.

5: Simulation continued - the Jiggly bit from Paul smith on Vimeo.

Incase you've never heard of Pooby, this is one of his more well-known works:

Greg 2 from Paul smith on Vimeo.

PS: BTW, we're still waiting for that muscle system tutorial, Paul! ;)

Back Muscle test from Paul smith on Vimeo.

GEAR - opensource rigging system for Softimage

GEAR - Quick overview from Jeremie Passerin on Vimeo.

It includes a modular rigging system to easily create rigs for any kind of character in Autodesk Softimage.
This first video shows a basic overview of the system. Three videos can be viewed on the Vimeo GEAR channel.

Expect an initial release any day now.

The Bendy One

The Bendy One from Jason Wells on Vimeo.

This was a speed test using an old project and some newish techniques I've gained. It was composited in XSI using the FX tree. I used my RM_Architectural compound to generate the seperate diffuse (albedo), specular and reflective, etc passes via channels. I used fast radiosity technique to generate indirect illumination from a blurred HDR map (frame rendertime less than 20 secs). I baked an Ambient Occlusion pass as a texture using rendermap and reduced the render speed of each 1270x720 frame to 2 seconds. The longest part for rendering was the glossy floor reflection which I reduced by limiting the reflective area with a weight map.

I used a radial gradient in FX tree to create a vignetting effect and blurred some duplicates of the specular pass to get glows on the highlights. I'll try to do some tests with DOF and motion vector driven motion blur next.