XSIBlog

XSIBlog is Patrick's brainchild. It was born out of his need to immerse himself in the knowledge of others and share whatever he could with the community. Patrick has been working in visual effects since 1999 and through the years has composited on Flint and Shake and done 3D on Softimage|3D, Maya and XSI. Since the beginning of 2002 he works as a pipeline and workflow geek, integrating off the shelf and custom tools in production support roles. LinkedIn Profile

I really like applications that provide rich SDKs for it’s users to play around with. I also like event based systems and callbacks. These are all things that make me absolutely love writing up plugins inside XSI. But there is one small problem, I find, with XSI’s callbacks.
Callbacks in XSI plugins are functions in the [...]

Two weeks ago Bryan Blevins, CG Supervisor at Wild Canary, asked a question on the Softimage|Net community about the possibility of doing proxy selects.
You all remember the idea of a proxy parameter where editing a parameter in a custom PPG (lets call this one the source) will in fact be changing another elsewhere in the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]