XSIBlog

Figuring out which user preference you have modified in XSI is much easier since the last few releases.
First and foremost, only the user preferences that are different from the factory defaults are saved. This was partly done to allow overriding a user preference with a workgroup user preference file.
They are saved in your user [...]

I was helping out a buddy the other day, helping him get a script running in Softimage XSI. I had the error fixed in a few minutes and then I started goofing off with his code and cutting it down. Then I hit a part of his script where XSI returns an array of data. [...]

Stefano Jannuzzo’s article on Adaptive Occlusion gave me an idea: to control occlusion sampling based on motion samples.
Occlusion techniques can be really fast nowadays for static objects. You can bake it or use Final Gathering occlusion and store it in a Final Gathering Map for example. But with moving objects, those techniques can’t be used.
For [...]

The standard occlusion shaders sample the environment sending out a bunch of rays, and return a color based on the percentage of rays hitting some objects. Mathematically speaking, they integrate the hemisphere (or the cone) centered above the normal with the given number of samples. As we know, a higher sampling rate gives better results, [...]