XSIBlog

If your editor supports the launching of external programs and allows you to insert text to the command line based on your current selection, then you can get context sensitive help from the XSI SDK help file. This will work for both the C++ and scripting SDKs. This snippet shows how to perform this in the Crimson Editor but it will work equally well in any other well supported editor that has this feature.

The hyperlinks generated in the Script Editor when an script error is thrown can be very helpful in finding exactly where a problem has occurred. The only issue is that if you are using an external editor, the line number is not communicated to the editor to make it automatically scroll to the line of code that produced the error.

Most standalone text editors allow for a command line parameter to indicate which line number to position the cursor when opening a new file. By making a quick change to one of XSI’’s scripts, we can communicate this to the external editor. To make this change, follow the steps below.

What did Softimage trade off to get the Fx Tree?
A common question that comes back often, usually when the flames are high and the knives are flying low!
Could the time spent on the XSI compositor have been used instead to build a particle engine, integrate Render Man, do a PaintFx clone, or that thing that’’s [...]

Presently getting movie formats on Windows 64-bit is difficult.
Here’’s the situation.
You can’t mix 32-bit and 64-bit in one application
Windows 64-bit runs both 32-bit (Win32) and 64-bit (Win64) applications. However, Win64 applications cannot use 32-bit DLLs, and vice-versa. (Video codecs are DLLs) Both binary formats live in completely different address [...]

ABSTRACT
This article is intended more as a tutorial rather than technical or idea discussion. In this article I will explore a few texturing techniques to avoid the use of cluster materials.
INTRODUCTION
Fundamentally, putting materials on clusters seem to be the most logical approach to put different materials on a single mesh. For example, when I came [...]