Softimage XSI 7.01 Is it still usable

General discussion about 3D DCC and other topics
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Mathaeus
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Re: Softimage XSI 7.01 Is it still usable

Post by Mathaeus » 23 Sep 2015, 17:57

artistfuture wrote:Hello everyone
Thanks again for your support. I installed 3delight plugin but every time I use the 3delight skin shader softimage crashes. I use just the standard softimage shader the image renders out a black image. Does anyone have any idea why this is happening.
Hello,

If this is still about XSI 7.01. Version 4.12, suggested by Hirazi, should work, but only partially. Afaik it won't be able to generate environment shaders. 3delight material does not work in 7.01, perhaps in all other SI versions, relying only on SPDL based shaders. I think the last 3delight, completely compatible with 7.01, it is around 3.1.38, sometime from spring 2013 or so.
Personally, last I've used with XSI 7.01, it is 3delight 4.12 - but, with manually edited 'final' (compiled by 3delight, normally) environment shaders. Also had to hack the factory shaders, to get a nicer threshold for multiple importance sampling - I think only 3delight material has a sort of automatic MIS threshold, otherwise there's pretty fast, but noisy default.

Other than that, 3delight generally don't like hyphen (minus) letter anywhere in shader name. In case of materials on clusters, rule is one shader on one cluster (so, not one shader repeatedly applied on many clusters). Mix of master material and materials on clusters won't work, master material should be different than any material on clusters.

artistfuture
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Re: Softimage XSI 7.01 Is it still usable

Post by artistfuture » 24 Sep 2015, 00:19

Hello Mathaeus

Thanks for responding. I'm sorry you lost me with the terms. I never used 3delight before I'm a newbie. To be honest I'm not that advance in XSI either. I really trying to master XSI I trying to move away from Maya and since I own a copy of Softimage XSI 7.01 hope I'm not to late. Thank you for your help. I want to take some models I create in Zbrush and Maya and start to use XSI. I'm also trying to find some tutorial on hard surface modeling in XSI its hard to find them out there. Do you have any suggestion. It seems that 3delight and XSI is my best options for rendering. I will appreciate any help you can offer. Thanks again

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Hirazi Blue
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Re: Softimage XSI 7.01 Is it still usable

Post by Hirazi Blue » 24 Sep 2015, 08:19

Make sure to check out our Tutorials subforum. There still is a lot of training material out there... ;)
Stay safe, sane & healthy!

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Mathaeus
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Location: Zagreb, Croatia

Re: Softimage XSI 7.01 Is it still usable

Post by Mathaeus » 24 Sep 2015, 09:03

artistfuture wrote:It seems that 3delight and XSI is my best options for rendering. I will appreciate any help you can offer. Thanks again
For now, I think the realistic option is, to do more of tests, to isolate the problem. REYES mode with/without environment shader, path tracing with/without envronment. My-shader-name or my_shader_name, so on. Material on cluster or not. Copy the all 3delight related warnings from script editor. Then, with collected results, send a mail to 3delight support, to see if they can do something.
Should be better if more than one user is interested.
Version I've mentioned as ''probably the last completely compatible", it is a commercial version. Free versions from these times (around 2013) were limited to two cores, so not that much to get from them. Personally I'm not on yearly support anymore, so don't have any more of "influence" than anyone else.