SOFTIMAGE has announced XSI 7, with their latest release SOFTIMAGE addresses many of the pain points that 3D artist are facing. 3D artist can now easily without knowing any properitary program language design new images or movies and finish project faster. One of the biggest improvements is ICE – Interactive Creative Environment which extends into everything within XSI. Artist can deform, apply weigh, author, share & collaborate, apply particles and  animate particles, faces, vertices, edges or velocity of faces. With ICE artist can do what they love to do: be creative.

From the Press Release

“Softimage Co., a part of Avid Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: AVID), today announced SOFTIMAGE®|XSI® 7, the latest version of its professional 3D animation software for games, film and television. SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 software will introduce a transformative open platform called ICE, designed to capture the infinitely creative vision of content producers. With a visual interface and an easy-to-use node-based programming model, users will be able to quickly create complex visual effects. ICE will allow artists to explore, learn and modify the robust library of particle-based visual effects and deformation tools that will ship in SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 software, or simply build new ones from scratch.

…

Availability:
SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 is expected to be available in Q3 2008.
Pricing for SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 Essentials will be USMSRP $2,995.
Pricing for SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 Advanced will be USMSRP $4,995.

…”

Some of the new key features of SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 :

• ICE – Interactive Creative Environment
  With ICS (Interactive Creative Environment) artists can create complex 3D effects and tools extremely quickly and intuitively using a node-based dataflow diagram. ICE Demonstration videos.
  

1. XSI 7 ICE Video Tutorial: Building a Force from a Curve Video Tutorial
2. XSI 7 Video Tutorial: ICE an Artist Tour #1 (from Bradley Gabe)
3. XSI 7 Video Tutorial: Vortex Control with ICE (from Bradley Gabe)

• GIGACORE II ARCHITECTURE
  The new core, GigaCore II  is fully multi-threaded and 64-bit.
• Integrated mental ray 3.6 Renderer
  This update adds new controls for final gathering and displacement rendering, as well as options for optimizing and accelerating global illumination, and global ambient occlusion settings. XSI 7.0 integrates  mental ray renderer version 3.6.
  • Importons – Importons are photon particles emitted from the camera (instead of a light source). mental ray uses these photon particles to calculate how important a photon is for the illumination of an image. With this technique, you get a lighter photon map and faster rendering as photon lookup is optimized.
  • Stand-ins – Object render archives (also known as mental ray assemblies or stand-ins) provide a method of offloading assets so that they can be loaded and unloaded, on-demand, at render time. The object render archive file is loaded into the render as an encapsulated “sub-scene” which can be unloaded automatically if mental ray starts to run low on physical memory. This reduces memory consumption and allows for faster rendering times. Stand-ins are particularly useful for assembling cumulatively large and detailed scenes such as cityscapes, dense forests of trees, and even crowds of animated characters.
  • New Final Gathering Algorithm “Exact” mode – Exact mode bypasses the final gathering point cache entirely and always computes the full final gathering solution for every sample. This mode will yield more accurate and superior quality results because none of the final gathering points are derived by interpolating values from an initial cache of final gathering points.
  • Auto-Configuring BSP 2 Raytracing Acceleration – The BSP2 raytracing acceleration technique is the next generation BSP algorithm used by mental ray. It was developed, primarily, for the efficient rendering of scenes with large BSP trees and is required for rendering scenes with stand-ins (also known as mental ray assemblies). It is also auto-configuring so the user does not have to setup complicated BSP options anymore.
  • Irradiance Particles – The new mental ray irradiance particles algorithm provides a method of calculating global illumination using importons. Irradiance particles are easy to set up in your scene and with just the default settings, you can reach a desirable illumination quality much faster than the existing solutions of global illumination photon tracing combined with final gathering.

• Render Manager Improvements
  3D Artist can now easier setup and manager their render jobs, all that with an simpler and easier to use interface.
• GLSL Shaders
  Two new OpenGL-based shaders are now part of XSI 7.
  
• OpenGL Particle Shader
  Improved function that allows the artist to even better work with particles in XSI using OpenGL.
• Global color management tools
  Artist have more control on the output images or videos with color management. Supports
  
• Delta II
  One of the major breakthroughs in workgroup collaboration was Delta referencing (in XSI 6). In addition to XSI’s robust referencing system, Delta allows you to store the changes to a model in a lightweight manner. You can then export, import and apply deltas manually. You can also edit and delete deltas and items within deltas, and even change a delta’s target model. The result is an extremely efficient, robust and flexible way for artists to work collaboratively in production.
  Delta II updates the already successful referencing system with numerous new features:
  • Create New Clusters
  • Create new cluster properties, including texture UV coordinates, vertex colors, weight maps, and envelope weight properties. You can create cluster properties on new clusters, or on clusters that pre-existed in the original model.
  • Add deformation operators and ICE trees to the construction stack. This includes deformations on new and pre-existing clusters as well as deformations that are linked to other objects (lattices, waves, cluster centers, etc.).
  • Add operators to the stacks of cluster properties, including painting and smoothing weight maps and envelope weights, modifying texture UV coordinates, etc. Note that UV modifications are frozen when the model is offloaded (including before switching resolutions or saving the scene).
  • Delete any operators, clusters, properties, and cluster properties that have been added to the referenced model. Deleted items are removed from the delta.
  • Save animation mixer Cache data in the delta.

• RTS 3.0-an updated realtime shader API featuring all new programmable shaders that support the latest display technologies.
  XSI version 7.0 supports the Realtime Shader API version 3.0. There have been some major changes and enhancements since version 2.0 that add flexibility and simplicity in the development of realtime shaders

Mario Prang the key person behind Slash did release his second XSI Training DVD (more then 4 hours of XSI training). This time Mario show you how to use Rigid & Soft Bodies in XSI. The training which is in German provides you with an excellent overview on Rigid Bodies, Rigid Constraints and Soft Bodies. Slash is a certified Softimage Training Center who offers beginner, intermediate, and advanced courses for companies or individuals.

Rigid & Soft Bodies training DVD overview:

Rigid Bodies

• Rigid Body basic
• Collision Type
• Initial State
• Active Passive Switch
• Rigid Body Notes
• Environment Caching
• Force Controller
• Glas with ice cubes
• Ghosting

Rigid Constraints

• Hinge
• Ball & Socket
• Spring
• Slider
• Fixed
• Motor
• Rag doll Constraints 1
• Rag doll Constraints 2
• Car Constraints 1
• Car Constraints 2

Soft Body

• Soft Body basic
• Soft Body animation
• Soft Body Settings
• Plasticity
• Soft & Rigid Bodies
• Basketball 1
• Basketball 2
• Basketball 3 Gator

This second Training DVD Mario released is a follow-up release to his successful XSI Character Design Training DVD (6 DVDs and more then 10 Hours of XSI training)) which was released earlier this year. The XSI Character Design Training DVD is recorded in German.

Next Limit released MAXWELL RENDER 1.7. Maxwell Render 1.7 offers several new and vastly improved features.

If you a customer of Next Limit check your inbox to find the URL to download the update.

What is new in MAXWELL Render 1.7

• New physical sky system
  The Physical Sky system in Maxwell Render 1.7 uses an entirely new approach and has been greatly enhanced adding more parameters to control the look of the sky and the resulting light in the scene, ranging from common Earth values to exaggerated fantasy skies. Users can create presets of sky settings to quickly load a new sky, or share their presets with other users. It’s also possible to save the current sky as an HDR map.This new sky system renders faster than the previous one – in certain scenes the difference can be dramatic. The concept of “Aerosols” – particles found in the air that interact with light and influence how lights scatters and reacts in the atmosphere – plays an important role. Aerosols have a big impact on the coloration of the sky and scene illumination.
• 1.7 Material Editor enhanced
  • Material Preview: the material preview now shows incremental updates and you can stop the preview rendering at any time by double clicking on the preview.
  • Material Swatches: here you can store material “swatches” or previews. A material state can be stored as a preview and the user can easily browse between the saved previews, allowing for faster material editing and experimentation.
  • Texture Editor: the Texture Editor in 1.7 offers various new image controls: Saturation; Brightness; Contrast; and Clamp min/max. These new controls allow users to work much more efficiently with textures. There is no need to use an external image editing application to make small changes to a texture, and the same texture can be used for colour, bump, roughness and weight map.
  • Wizards: this is a step-by-step guide to creating several types of common materials such as shiny wooden floors, plastics, clipmapped materials for leafs, SSS materials, etc. The Wizard will ask you for textures, bumps, reflectance maps and material values such as roughness and colour.The “Common” wizard can be used to create Diffuse, Emitter, Metal, Dielectric or Plastic materials

• New SSS Component
  Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS) simulates the effect of light entering a translucent object and scattering inside it. Some of this light is absorbed and some is also scattered back to the surface. It is a crucial component that allows you to accurately simulate many kinds of materials including plastics, marble, milk, skin etc. The SSS component has been entirely rewritten for Maxwell Render 1.7, following an entirely new approach compared to the old system or any other SSS system currently available.The SSS component in Maxwell Render effectively replaces the BSDF material properties such as  eflectance/transmittance becausethe surface reflection color and amount depends on what happens inside the volume, just like in real life. There is no separation between “surface” material and “volume” material. The surface properties (roughness, bump etc.) remain the same as for the BSDF component. What this means in practice is that with the SSS component, you can get a full range of materials from regular clear glass, to almost solid-looking materials. This is one of the biggest strengths of Maxwell Render’s SSS system. The SSS material supports full GI and if the material is clear enough it will create caustic light patterns and also be influenced by caustic light cast from surrounding objects.

  You can weight an SSS with a BSDF, or several SSS components, but only one SSS or BSDF per material layer is allowed. You can quickly switch between using a BSDF or SSS component by right-clicking in the Material Layers list or by using the Edit menu and choosing “Turn to BSDF” or “Turn to SSS’. The Nd and surface properties you used in the previous component will be transferred to the new compone

• 1.7 Maxwell Studio improvements
  • Texture Handling and Memory Optimizations: texture handling, scene loading times and overall memory usage have all been improved. With scenes that use many large textures, objects and materials, the loading time is around 10 times faster. Only the textures that are active in the OpenGL viewport are now loaded into memory, saving RAM and allowing users to work faster with materials.
  • Realtime OpenGL Preview of Physical Sky: with the vastly improved Physical Sky system in Maxwell Render 1.7, the OpenGL preview in the viewports has also been improved, allowing you to change any of the Sky parameters and camera settings and seeing an accurate realtime preview in the viewports.
  • Color Picker: the color chips on the left side can be used to store commonly used colors. Drag& drop a color from the large color chips at the bottom of the Color Picker to one of the color chips on the left to store a color.
    The two large color chips at the bottom of the color picker allow you to compare the previously selected color with a new one.The top color chip updates to show the currently selected color in the colored wheel. The bottom color chip shows what color was selected when opening the Color Picker.
  • Isolate Selection: select this option from the right click menu in the object list panel, or in a viewport, to display only the currently selected objects in the viewport. This is useful if you have a cluttered scene and wish to view only the currently selected objects.
  • UV Operator: this option lets you apply the same transformations to all the selected UVs at the same time. You can, for example, scale all the selected UV sets by 10%. The Operator is found under the UV parameters section in the Object Parameters panel.
  • Material Browser: improved for version 1.7; it has a more common functionality with the Windows Explorer, having a folder view on the left side and the contents of the folder displayed on the right side.
  • 3D/ Ortho View Dropdown: You can switch a camera to be a perspective (3D) camera or an orthographic camera (2D). This is useful if you wish to render an orthographic view while still having access to common camera parameters such as resolution and ISO. Please note that focal length is not available when the camera is in orthographic mode.

• SimuLens
  SimuLens parameters: the SimuLens parameters have been added to the interface of Maxwell Studio and the plug-ins, and they are now also available through the command line. These changes allow for SimuLens to be used for animations.
• MXiMerge Tool
  The installation package includes a new tool called MxiMerge. This is a small command line application useful to merge MXI files into one folder. It can also be used to read information about an MXI file (resolution, sampling level, etc) and for converting MXI files into other image formats. To learn more about how to use this tool just open a command line/terminal window and type: (for Windows) MxiMerge.exe –help; (for Mac OSX and Linux) mximerge –help.
• MAXWELL Plugins
  All Plugins (3ds Max, Archicad 11, Cinema 4D, form-Z, Lightwave 3D, Maya, Rhinoceros, SolidWorks,  and Softimage | XSI) have been updated

I would like to point you to the Wired Mag article “The Software That Will Take Digital F/X to the Next Level of Awesome” that has been published. Written by Michael Behar.

simartom did release T-Gen, T-Gen is a tree and plant generator plugin which is fully integrated into XSI. According to simartom T-Gen comes with over 80 appearance and distribution parameters, full utilization of XSI curves and node-based hierarchy ensures great flexibility and huge possibilities while creating your own trees and plants. Almost all parameters of T-Gen are animatable, so you can create animations of growing trees, plants and even abstract objects. T-Gen features include:

• Tree and Plant generation
• Customizable Leaf and Branch design
• Animatable trees and plants
• Preset Manager and additonal presets on the website
• Node-based tree and plant hierarchy
• Geometry optimization

The regular T-Gen price is 119 EUR, however you can buy T-Gen now for promotional price 99 EUR (lasts until October 25,2007)

Before you buy you could trial T-Gen by using T-Gen Free which provides most of T-Gen Master functionality.

You can find more information on the T-Gen website

• T-Gen Documentation

• T-Gen Tutorials

• Feature list

• T-Gen Downloads