Nonlinear animation (NLA) is at the heart of the XSI architecture. This scalable and completely customizable environment gives you all of the tools and genuine flexibility to quickly and cre-atively respond to any request. An array of new performance, data management, and workflow enhancing features are built into the core of ver-sion 3.0, including the ability to deal with even larger, more complex scenes with ease using such tools as the revolutionary new XSI
Explorer. Artists can also take advantage of unique new innovations, such as the interactive camera manipulation and navigation tools, to interac-tively view their work during the creative process.
Softimage continues to drive the character animation market with new cutting-edge additions to character skeleton construction, such as options for generating fully customizable, film-quality biped and quadruped rigs.
Version 3.0 provides additional flexibility, higher levels of interactivity, and simplifies the creation of complex rigging tasks. These new tools are also perfect for smaller shops that previously could not afford the investment necessary to develop such high quality character setups and rigging.
XSI v.3.0 is the perfect tool for creating realistic armies of characters or clones. XSI now offers a new production-proven, high-performance and interactive crowd simulation pipeline to automate the creation of complex and heavy crowd scenes. With these new features, you can master the cre-ation of thousands of characters or objects directly within XSI while maintaining the ability to tweak and perfect the results post-simulation.
Interactive rendering in Softimage|XSI has taken another leap forward with the integration of mental ray v.3.1 technology. Dramatic improve-ments in quality and speed, combined with the overall quality and
integration of the rendering toolset, maintain XSI rendering as the market leader for the intuitive, interactive creation of images of unsurpassed realism.
XSI v.3.0 offers a powerhouse of new tools and productivity enhance-ments to digital artists working on interactive media projects. These new tools include unique support for programmable DirectX real-time shading effects, new PDKs for Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation 2, updated mesh-modeling tools offering a more intuitive working environment, better performance with more complex models, and state-of-the-art UV texturing tools.
XSI v.3.0 includes new versions of the XSI Viewer, the dotXSI File Tool Kit (FTK), dotXSI file format, and a new C++ API for the XSI SDK. Built ahead of the curve with a dramatically accelerated development cycle, Softimage|XSI v.3.0 offers a suite of unmatched productivity-enhancing tools without creative compromise.
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NewTek LightWave 7.5 (www.Newtek.com)
NewTek’s LightWave is a complete and flexible 3D graph-ics and animation application proven for years in the film, television, and gaming industries. LightWave includes tools that other packages offer separately, such as soft-body dynamics, particles, hair and
fur, and unlimited render nodes.
Hollywood has used LightWave for
such films as AI: Artificial Intelligence, Armageddon, Behind Enemy Lines, Black Knight, Blade, Charlie’s Angels, Contact, Deep Impact, Devil’s Advo-cate, Driven, Dungeons and Dragons, Final Fantasy, Flubber, Goldeneye, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park 3, Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, Lost in Space, Pitch Black, Rollerball, Scary Movie, Scary Movie 2, The One, The Sixth Day, The Time Machine, Titanic, Waterworld, and X-Men.
Many computer and video games have utilized LightWave, such as Anachronox, Asheron’s Call, Baldur’s Gate, Civilization 3, Daikatana, Deus Ex (2000 Game of the Year), Duke Nukem’, Everquest: The Ruins of Kunark, Halo, Homeworld (1999 Game of the Year), Icewind Dale, Kiss Psycho Circus, Quake III Team Arena, Resident Evil: Code Veronica X, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Serious Sam First Encounter (2001 Game of the Year), Serious Sam Second Encounter, Star Trek Elite Force, Star Trek:
Klingon Academy, Ultima Online, and Unreal Championship.
NewTek’s LightWave 3D supports Windows 98, Me, 2000, NT 4 with 128 MB of RAM, and the Macintosh systems like the Power Macintosh Processor (G3 or higher), Mac OS 9 (with 384 MB of RAM), and Mac OS X (with 128 MB of RAM).
NewTek LightWave 3D for the Mac OS 9 and X native and Windows 98, 2000, Me, and NT 4.0 was $2,495 and is now (1/2003) $1,595. LightWave 3D includes soft-body dynamics, particles, and Sasquatch lite for hair and fur. An upgrade to LightWave 7.5 sells for (1/2003) $795.
NewTek has released LightWave 3D 7.5, an upgrade from version 7, which supports Macintosh and Windows platforms with features such as sliders that control animation settings, customizable to help animate char-acters, lighting rigs, and more. Forget about memorizing a long list of commands with Expression Builder (expression creator). Use Dynamic Parenting and Simple Constraints to make complex interactions between objects easier to animate. Motion blur and depth-of-field effects can be previewed. The Motion Mixer has been improved with new motion weighting and blending features.
NewTek LightWave’s Modeler has long held the title as the world’s best polygonal modeler. Game developers will find it to be a major weapon in creating efficient, yet great-looking models for fast, exciting gameplay.
LightWave’s advanced UV mapping, weight maps, gradient controls, and motion and texture baking all contribute to a powerful arsenal for the game developer.
A few of NewTek LightWave’s new feature highlights include subdivi-sion surfaces, inverse kinematics, and nonlinear animation.
n Subdivision surfaces—With the press of the Tab key, your model changes from a 30-polygon faceted rough to an organically rounded, smooth, flowing sculpture (a head or a body, human, animal, or alien; a cool sports car; or a techno-organic spaceship perhaps). Subdivision surfaces provide modeling as complex as you need with great economy of effort and time. You model with simple polygons at only a fraction of the number the final model will need. You have complete control of
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your model but with a simplicity and ease you would never have expected when creating complex natural or engineered objects.
n Inverse kinematics (IK)—LightWave lets you use virtual bones to quickly and easily make a skeleton for your character and use FK (for-ward kinematics) and IK to move the character. For(for-ward kinematics:
Rotate the upper arm, and the forearm, hand, and fingers must follow.
Inverse kinematics: Put a “goal” just at the end of the fingers, and then if you want your character to reach for that M&M on the table, just move the goal toward the M&M and the character’s arm will move in proper fashion. These can be combined for realistic movement in any situation. And LightWave’s “Faster Bones” option makes animating a complex character quick and responsive.
n Nonlinear animation—LightWave also includes a nonlinear animation tool, Motion Mixer. Previously saved motion cycles such as walking, running, jumping, etc. can be mixed and matched, stretched, and short-ened as needed to produce just the movement and timing you need for your project. Animate once, customize endlessly.
LightWave 7.5 has a suggested retail price of $1,595.
Softimage 3D base retails for $1,495 and includes network licensing (server-based floating), floating operating system capacity (server-based cross-operating system floating license for Windows, Linux, and IRIX), unlimited instances of SOFTIMAGE|3D in interactive and command-line mode on same workstation with same license, unlimited command-line rendering on multiple workstations (Softimage renderer only), launch dis-tributed rendering (with additional mental ray 2.1 stand-alone licenses) from the interactive application or from the command line, and
SOFTIMAGE|SDK ClothExtreme (purchased separately).
Softimage 3D extreme retails for $2,495 and includes ParticleSuite, MetaClay, SoftBody, mental ray 2.1 renderer (single processor—mental ray license enables tools such as Render Map (for lightmaps), Photon Wiz-ard (for radiosity and caustic effects), and more), Softimage renderer, network licensing (server-based floating), floating operating system capac-ity (server-based cross-operating system floating license for Windows, Linux, and IRIX), unlimited instances of SOFTIMAGE|3D in interactive and command line mode on same workstation with same license, unlim-ited command-line rendering on multiple workstations (Softimage renderer only), launch distributed rendering (with additional mental ray 2.1 stand-alone licenses) from the interactive application or from the com-mand line, and SOFTIMAGE|SDK ClothExtreme (purchased separately).
SOFTIMAGE ClothExtreme provides SOFTIMAGE|XSI users with unmatched cloth realism, including collisions with geometric objects and self-collision. Fully integrated within the SOFTIMAGE|XSI workflow, it retails for $595.