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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Have you ever used Apple’s Shake? Have you ever built macros with Shake? Have you ever wished you could create macros in XSI’s Render Tree?
Well you can, these are called Phenomenon. A Phenomenon is group of shaders exposed to the users as a single entity. You can hide or show, as you see fit, any [...]

The idea of painting base lighting, is to control the lighting like with a standard lighting setup but instead of adding lights in the scene, you paint light in a map. This technique is not a new lighting technique, it is just the “Image Based Lighting” technique (IBL). The goal of Painting Base Lighting (PBL) is to be as flexible as 3d lights objects.

A whole lot of time can be wasted by tweeking a parameter in XSI when you don’t know the units it’s expressed in. This is especially true in simulation.
Simulations
You can deduce the units of a parameter rapidly with only a few tries. The Age of a particle is expressed in seconds, not frames. The Size [...]

A while back one of the guys here comes up to me and tells me that he wants to render a frame.
“Good for you! Go right ahead, you have my blessings!” - I tell him.
He then proceeds to make me understand that he can’t. If he wants to render out a single frame of only [...]