XSIBlog

Hey gang,

working on some characters with secondary motion I came up with a pretty simple spring op including some caching / plotting functionality and thought I'd share it.
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When you start building new tools or a new pipeline you have to answer quite a few artist-centric questions such as what you want these tools to do and how they will fit into the workflow. You also have to answer a few technical questions unless you might wind up in a quagmire consisting of disparate tools, unmaintainable code and longer than necessary development times.

Some of the choices that need to be addressed are the technological choices of tools, systems, libraries and techniques.

Which tools and technologies should you use and why? I won't pretend to be suggesting the holy grail of tool chests. I just felt like sharing the choices I've made and why I made them. Please don't hesitate and comment if you think I'm off base, you have questions or would like to suggest other alternatives that you use. I'd love to hear, and learn, from you!

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I've finally decided to pipe the site's RSS Feeds through Feedburner.

Update your subscriptions if you wish. The links can be found in the footer, entries to the left and comments to the right.

Cheers!

When working with XSI in a facility I often use Python modules to better package my code and allow easy reuse of key parts in the different tools that are developed. These modules I usually keep in a location on the main drive of the workstations, for example: C:\<facilityName>\libs\python.

I'll also put in place a system to push central library changes to the local computers and insert the library location in the PYTHONPATH environment variable.

The XSI Wiki has a great page on the pros and cons of the module approach. One of the cons is that the Application global variable is only accessible in your script files and plugin files and not in your modules.

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After so many years, Xsi still does not ship any basic trigonometric functions like sine and cosine. Although they are very easy to code for a shader writer, it is, however, possible to dig them out of the existing nodes.

This is an example of how sometimes you can write a phenomenon just to downgrade a more powerful node to get what you need.

The starting point is noticing that the node that more resembles the sine and cosine look is the Wave one. By connecting it straight to the surface and setting the parameters as shown, you have something really looking like a cosine function.

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