Softimage Blog

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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The middle-aged of you will probably remember those names from the 90s.
Phoenix Tools was a plugin company for Softimage 3D, and I was one of the founders. We did good and bad, and we eventually closed down in 2002.
Arete had an excellent reputation for their ocean and atmospheric library, called Digital Nature Tools. I think [...]

Recently we had to face this interesting problem: extracting a constant pass out of an arbitrarely complex rendertree. In short, we received scenes set up for rendering, with a given number of passes and channels already set up. However, we needed an extra constant pass which was not planned in advance.
The rendertrees have all kinds [...]

What you need to reproduce theses examples :
HDRShop
HDRShop plugin Diffuse_SH.
 
I used to work for a 2 years at Framestore-CFC in London. That mean I use Maya and PRMan as my main application. During this year I learn a lot of thing but also hear a lot of false assumtion about [...]

It is sometimes desirable to be able to check the shadow maps look.
Since XSI does not allow for shadow maps paths, this is how you can do (a ray3 standalone license is required).
After setting up a shadow mapped light, export a single frame archive (mi2) ascii file.
Edit the file with a text editor, and look [...]

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 [...]