Cycles for Softimage

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Sycles 2.4.1Author: Shekn @si-community
V 2.4.1 released August 2026 —

This is a full integration of the Blender Cycles renderer into XSI. Version 2.4 is compiled with Cycles 5.3 (state of July 2026). The second generation of the addon (since 2.0) is a complete rewrite and works with Softimage 2015 SP2.

New since version 2.1.3 (from the github release notes): 2.4.1: fixed incorrect transforms of instances when the master model has rotation or scale, repacked with missing DLLs 2.4: Cycles 5.3. New Alpha parameter for the ImageTexture node, Sky Texture with Single and Multiple Scattering models, Thin Film for Metallic and Glass BSDF, new Raycast and Scene Time nodes, OSL custom camera, Linear 3D curve shape (also as per-object override), Geometry Approximation mode for NURBS surfaces, Render Time pass (CPU), texture optimisation (resolution, limit, tx texture cache) and a detailed scene export timing log 2.4: renders MaterialX shader trees from the MaterialXSI addon (converted to OSL). Note: OSL shading works on CPU render devices only 2.3.x: Cycles 4.5, OSL support is back, new Metallic BSDF and Set Normal nodes, phase function for Scatter Volume, Diffuse Roughness for Principled BSDF, more Noise Texture types, subdivision with motion deform, per-frame texture images, rendering of NURBS surfaces and curves (via custom properties), tile rendering, fixed shadow catcher, vector input ports for OSL shaders 2.2.x: nodes of Blender 4.3 (Ray Portal BSDF, Sheen BSDF, Gabor Texture, redesigned Principled BSDF), current Blender OCIO color profiles, custom velocity grids for VDB primitives, Particle Info node fed by ICE attributes, denoising of the final passes with OIDN or OptiX

Supported Softimage features (quoted from the download page):

Polygon meshes and hair geometry Texture coordinates Vertex colors Shaderball preview. For materials, shader nodes and texture nodes Basic limited support of the following built-in Softimage shader nodes: Phong, Lambert, Hair Shading, Image, converters between vector, color and scalar Ambience global environment light Limited support of built-in Softimage light sources Model instances ICE strands geometry ICE pointcloud instances ICE geometry attributes (vector, color and scalar) with context per-point and per-object Volume rendering. In particular supports emFluid, Explosia FX and openVDB for Softimage volumes Special VDB Primitive for rendering vdbs without ICE Output multilayered exr file with all rendered passes Rendermaps

The following features from Cycles itself are supported: CPU and GPU rendering. In particular multidevices are supported. This allows you to use cpu and gpu simultaneously. The libraries for GPU rendering are included in the package. All Cycles shader nodes OSL shaders OpenColorIO profiles (Blender profile included) All Cycles output passes (Combined, Depth, Normal and so on) Color and value shader AOVs Lightgroups Cycles camera properties, in particular all panorama modes Cycles light sources Denoising by using Open Image Denoise and OptiX denoiser

For more information, full documentation and a list of the available Cycles nodes see the download page linked below. There is no local backup because the addon is still frequently updated - the plugin can be downloaded on Shekn's github releases. The source code is available on github there as well.
download page: https://ssoftadd.github.io/syclesSecondGenPage.html / wiki with tutorials / all of Shekn's plugins / author on vimeo / si-community thread

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wireframex
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by wireframex » 20 Nov 2017, 21:28

Draise wrote: 20 Nov 2017, 21:14 I get Si crashes on a simple scene too (add cube, add grid, add area light, change viewport render preview to cycles = crash). Also after a project.
No pb here it works very well (Tested Render Region and Preview).
Light strengh default need to be improved.
Denoiser : On
AA Sample : 20
Tile size : 128x128 (best choice here)

OS : Windows 7 x64 - 28 Go Ram
Devices
1 GTX 1070
2 GTX Titan
"without mastery, power is nothing" - Softimage Addict User
CPU 3990x 128 Threads / 2 x 3090 RTX - 24 Go / 96 Go memory
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jonmoore
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by jonmoore » 26 Nov 2017, 19:56

So finally managed to grab 15 minutes to test Cycles4Soft 1.5 and the report is more good than bad.

First for the good. My pair of 1080 Ti's are both seen by Cycles and render times are apt for seeing both GPU's. Nodal shading behaves as it should and the denoiser works well too.

As for the bugs it's still a tad crashy this mainly occurs with real-time updates to the region render and preview render window. If you disable the automatic refresh the crashes go away (but so does much of the fluidity). Also, the region render suffers from missing blocks on a fairly regular basis (but there's no repeating patterns).

The biggest got-yer I encountered with with regard to colour management. You have to disable it in Soft and use ICIO within Cycles. If you don't do this you'll suffer with 8 bit banding issues.

I didn't explore that far into the feature set as I've been spending more time with X-Particles and Cycles 4D this weekend! ;)

All in all very impressed with the improvements since 1.4 and looking forward to 1.6 whenever that lands. But before then I'll dig a bit further as I want to test Cycles4Soft with Senior Mootz's wonderful addons.
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Shekn
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by Shekn » 10 May 2018, 14:06

Update 1.6. Download it here: https://ssoftadd.github.io/download/Sycles_1.6.xsiaddon
What's new:
1. Some bugfixes
2. Compiled with the latest version of the Cycles render (from 06.05.2018). This leads to the following changes:
2.1. Add new shader node Principled Volume
2.2. Now displacement has a vector format. It means that for bump or displace we should connect scalar value of the displace not to Displacement port of the material's root node, but to Displacement node and it vector output to the Bump Map port of the material. Examples and some descriptions are on the tutorials 5 and 6 on the manual (https://ssoftadd.github.io/manuals/Sycl ... %20Eng.pdf)

Also there are some new addons related to Sycles. The fist one is GESImporter. Download it here: https://ssoftadd.github.io/gesPage.html
This addon not only for Softimage, but also for Blender. Initially, the idea was to create a tool for transferring scenes from Softimage to Blender with all render parameters and materials. For Cycles, of course. For example, for rendering scenes and animations on free render-farm for Blender. Current version of the addon can export scene only in opposite direction - from Blender to Softimage. Actually it exports only static geometry, camera, light sources and, of course, materials. With this tool, you can easily take a shader or material from Blender (there are a lot of them both paid and free), and send it to Softimage. And then used it for rendering in Softimage.

Two other addons are libraries of materials, which was converted from Blender to Softimage by the previous tool.
The first library is from Blendermada site (http://blendermada.com/). Download it here: https://ssoftadd.github.io/blendermadaPage.html
The second library contains shaders and materials from different locations and packs. Download it here: https://ssoftadd.github.io/shadersPage.html
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sirdavid32
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by sirdavid32 » 10 May 2018, 14:25

Is there a test file or example file to see what is the interaction between pbr substance and sycles?
This is what I have been waiting for a full year now.
Thanks.

Ps: when you use pbr for cycles export settinhs on substance, does softimage Sycles picks it up with a correct network shader, oppacity, (pbr saavy)?
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wireframex
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by wireframex » 11 May 2018, 13:46

Thanks for supporting SI
Mootz plug support will be awesome !!
Phil3
"without mastery, power is nothing" - Softimage Addict User
CPU 3990x 128 Threads / 2 x 3090 RTX - 24 Go / 96 Go memory
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Shekn
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by Shekn » 11 May 2018, 15:42

sirdavid32 In fact Substance PBR nodes are not related to Substance. It is only the name of nodes from original addon for Blender (https://blendermarket.com/products/pbr-uber-shader). I named these nodes in the same way. There are no any synchronization for textures and shader nodes for maps from Substance Designer or Painter.

wireframex Support of rendering volumetric data is a main big target for future versions of the Sycles. Not only for emFluid but also for ExplosiaFX, openVDB and so on. All these data can be rendered in the same way. But now I don't know how to do this. It needs more investigations of the Cycles source code.
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wireframex
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by wireframex » 11 May 2018, 19:26

It will be a great thing for the community because all renderer has stopped development like VRay / Arnold ...
Redshift will never support the famous Mootz plugin and Octane seems to be dead... no news from "Face" More than 2 months now...
"without mastery, power is nothing" - Softimage Addict User
CPU 3990x 128 Threads / 2 x 3090 RTX - 24 Go / 96 Go memory
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jonmoore
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by jonmoore » 12 May 2018, 07:30

wireframex wrote: 11 May 2018, 19:26 It will be a great thing for the community because all renderer has stopped development like VRay / Arnold ...
Redshift will never support the famous Mootz plugin and Octane seems to be dead... no news from "Face" More than 2 months now...
What aspect of Eric's Mootzoid plugins can't you use with Redshift?

@shekn, Fantastic work fella. I had wondered with it being nearly six months since the last update if you had given up on Soft. But instead you've surpassed my expectations. :)

I use X-Particles with Cycles 4D and the integration tools you're providing between Cycles/Soft and Cycles/Blender goes beyond what they're providing. There's so much more choose from when it comes to Blender/Cycles farm services than for Cycles 4D. This give your toolset a major advantage for larger production lines.
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wireframex
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by wireframex » 12 May 2018, 20:27

jonmoore wrote: 12 May 2018, 07:30 What aspect of Eric's Mootzoid plugins can't you use with Redshift?
I'd like a full support for Emfluid :)

And also a multi GPU rendering support (more than 2 GPU card).
Actually I can't test 1.6 because of some holydays but next week :)
Phil
"without mastery, power is nothing" - Softimage Addict User
CPU 3990x 128 Threads / 2 x 3090 RTX - 24 Go / 96 Go memory
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jonmoore
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by jonmoore » 21 May 2018, 11:43

wireframex wrote: 12 May 2018, 20:27
I'd like a full support for Emfluid :)

And also a multi GPU rendering support (more than 2 GPU card).
Actually I can't test 1.6 because of some holydays but next week :)
Phil
Apologies for the late reply.

When it comes to GPU rendering of volumes, VDB seems to be the accepted workflow these days. Even Cycles 4D and X-Particles uses a VDB workflow. I would expect that Eric would have to add some SDK elements to emFluid for Cycles Soft to hook into and Eric has made it clear that in giving his plugins away they're fixed in time (more than fair considering his generosity).

If Cycles 4d doesn't render Xplosia sims natively (both maintained by the same company - Insydium), I can't see this happening for emFluid/Cycles Soft. Could be wrong but it seems unlikely. And the VDB workflow provides excellent results so the only difference will be a slightly more convenient workflow.
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rray
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by rray » 25 May 2018, 10:13

Thanks for keeping it updated shekn. It looks like this will become the only actively updated renderer for Softimage soon.. outlives Octane, Arnold (and probably soon Redshift)..
softimage resources section updated Sep 26th 2026
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sirdavid32
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by sirdavid32 » 20 Jun 2018, 21:49

So can it work on a laptop? Description says: V1.4 requires the Windows "Fall Creator's Update" and/or the Cuda Tookit installed for some hardware configurations.
I´m on a laptop, win10 x64
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Shekn
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by Shekn » 22 Jun 2018, 04:30

It should works without any additional installs and updates.
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sirdavid32
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by sirdavid32 » 23 Jun 2018, 01:11

I looked for sycles volume principled shader.
It´s not there.
I thought I read about the latest implementations on sycles that had the principled volume shader? or did I dreamed it? :D
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sirdavid32
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by sirdavid32 » 23 Jun 2018, 02:16

rray wrote: 06 Jul 2017, 14:52
by the way, who is the author? I did not found his name anywhere..
Angel 07 (and lately Shekn) on this forum, also made this fabric engine retopo tool:
viewtopic.php?f=27&t=5960

He/she seems to prefer to keep it anonymous B-)

Other plugins by him/her :D
https://ssoftadd.github.io/

Yeah, zero records on the entire internet. I don´t know how to "THANK HIM/HER". But at least we got this forum. Version 1.6 has principled volume shader!!
What other stuff can he do for adapting I/O between softimage and blender? :D
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sirdavid32
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Re: Cycles for Softimage

Post by sirdavid32 » 23 Jun 2018, 03:03

Principled volume shader on Sycles 1.6!!
Principled.PNG
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