Old XSI project not rendering properly.....

[Rork]

Hi all,

I'm trying to render out a scene coming from XSI 7.0, in SI 2014.
The main issue here is that the scene was imported from SI|3D (yes... that old) into XSI 7.0. Rendering works after import and converting the scene into a SI one.

But opening the same scene in 2014 renders out completely black, as if shaders and textures are disconnected from the scene.
A new pass with e.g. a AO shader will render with MR, so it's not the scene itself that's broken.
Maybe it's the move from 32bit to 64 bit, or just the plain fact the nodes in the scene are not supported by later versions.

Anyone have a clue what this can be? I do realize it's a big step from 7.0 to 2014.

Cheers for any thoughts on this, as there's some other things that will benefit from a more recent version of SI....

rob

[mc_axe]

Hey Rork

Did you tried to replace the render tree nodes in a single material does that fix anything?
What if you add a new material in that broken pass it still renders black?
Any errors when loading like missing paths etc?
Any mat applied on the background objects partition?

[Rork]

Hi,

Thanks for your thoughts!

A new pass with a new material will render, as with a new material override on the non-rendering pass itself.
My theory atm is that the SI|3D subsystem was helping XSI 7 in rendering the converted nodes from SI|3D.
But as later versions of (Softimage|)XSI were 64 bit, this import functionality was taken out, probably due to the fact SI|3D is 32 bit only for Windows.

And when importing a SI|3D scene into XSI 7 you get 'locked' material nodes, with textures attached only seen in the PPG, so you cannot edit them manually in the RenderTree.
Also, lots of Nurbs, UV's and camera's constrained to paths are borked as well, meaning lots of elbow grease getting everything up to speed again.

It's like trying to move a PowerAnimator 2.0 scene file in Maya 3.0 and moving it into Maya 2018, and expecting it to work 90% of the way...
I'm afraid this will be put away as an interesting experiment, but not working in the end. In addition to conversion tests with Polytrans and some other ones.


rob

[Draise]

Yeah, most of my old archives workflow from XSI 7 to 2015 was mainly just replacing/redoing the shaders from zero or using overrides.

[mc_axe]

My theory atm is that the SI|3D subsystem was helping XSI 7 in rendering the converted nodes from SI|3D.

Yep, that might be it.

SI3D users demanded backwards compatibility (in order to make the switch), AVID had to deliver. Maybe thats why we see so many revisions from summatra till version 4.0 so quickly. I think that ADSK desided at some point to throw away that subsystem alltogether in order to focus on XSI+ and a completely new userbase.

[FXDude]

You can PM me the scene if you want me to take a look at it, I did something similar a while back.

BTW, is this for one of recent posts asking to re-render si~3d scenes for a game?

Cheers,

Hi all,

I'm trying to render out a scene coming from XSI 7.0, in SI 2014.
The main issue here is that the scene was imported from SI|3D (yes... that old) into XSI 7.0. Rendering works after import and converting the scene into a SI one.

But opening the same scene in 2014 renders out completely black, as if shaders and textures are disconnected from the scene.
A new pass with e.g. a AO shader will render with MR, so it's not the scene itself that's broken.
Maybe it's the move from 32bit to 64 bit, or just the plain fact the nodes in the scene are not supported by later versions.

Anyone have a clue what this can be? I do realize it's a big step from 7.0 to 2014.

Cheers for any thoughts on this, as there's some other things that will benefit from a more recent version of SI....

rob