Archive for December, 2005



Getting SDK help from an external editor

December 23rd, 2005 by Andy Nicholas. Viewed 5617 times.

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.

Debugging made easier

December 22nd, 2005 by Andy Nicholas. Viewed 4101 times.

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.

Present Status of Quicktime on Windows XP-64

December 16th, 2005 by Luc-Eric. Viewed 33120 times.

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 [...]

The End Of Cluster Materials

December 12th, 2005 by Bernard Lebel. Viewed 17701 times.

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 [...]

XSI Command line install

December 11th, 2005 by Kim Aldis. Viewed 7261 times.

Intro
Installing XSI isn”t hard but it does involve a lot of button pressing, input of port numbers, confirmations and stuff that make it impractical if you”re installing across a number of machines, particularly if the installs are on render nodes that probably don”t have monitors and keyboards. There’’s a better way, though; Xsi’’s Windows [...]