XSIBlog

Render optimization: a black art that can make delivering the shot a reality. Rendering special effects, BSP tweaking discussions and the mental-ray engine are some of the subjects you may find in the following articles and posts.

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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 [...]

ABSTRACT
This article is sort of a tutorial-cookbook for scripting beginners. It discusses quick and simple techniques to script minor tasks related to shaders. We will try to focus more on Object Model techniques than Command Model ones. Please feel free to contribute to it if you know better!

ABSTRACT
This article discusses some of the problems and solutions involved in exporting shaders from XSI, using custom tools and custom file formats.
THE INITIAL GOALS
At Big Bang I wanted the ability to write materials to XML files (and read them back, of course). This would serve two major purposes. First, it would offer a granular set [...]

Some time ago, I stumbled across the MapVIZ node in Maya and was surprised, that Softimage didn’t implement something like this in our beloved software package, XSI. Well, last weekend I decided to code it myself.
The first step to take, was to decipher the the file structure of the FG and Photon maps. Since the [...]

Let’s look at a short technique that will allow you to export any custom function curve or scripting math function to a texturable node to be used in the rendertree.
Let’s get a curve
We start by taking a poly strip, with a 100×1 subdivisions. This will be our “drawing” table. We then make a cluster of [...]