XSIBlog

When you start building new tools or a new pipeline you have to answer quite a few artist-centric questions such as what you want these tools to do and how they will fit into the workflow. You also have to answer a few technical questions unless you might wind up in a quagmire consisting of disparate tools, unmaintainable code and longer than necessary development times.

Some of the choices that need to be addressed are the technological choices of tools, systems, libraries and techniques.

Which tools and technologies should you use and why? I won’t pretend to be suggesting the holy grail of tool chests. I just felt like sharing the choices I’ve made and why I made them. Please don’t hesitate and comment if you think I’m off base, you have questions or would like to suggest other alternatives that you use. I’d love to hear, and learn, from you!

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I’ve finally decided to pipe the site’s RSS Feeds through Feedburner.

Update your subscriptions if you wish. The links can be found in the footer, entries to the left and comments to the right.

Cheers!

When working with XSI in a facility I often use Python modules to better package my code and allow easy reuse of key parts in the different tools that are developed. These modules I usually keep in a location on the main drive of the workstations, for example: C:\<facilityName>\libs\python.

I’ll also put in place a system to push central library changes to the local computers and insert the library location in the PYTHONPATH environment variable.

The XSI Wiki has a great page on the pros and cons of the module approach. One of the cons is that the Application global variable is only accessible in your script files and plugin files and not in your modules.

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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 more powerful node to get what you need.

The starting point is noticing that the node that more resembles the sine and cosine look is the Wave one. By connecting it straight to the surface and setting the parameters as shown, you have something really looking like a cosine function.

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I think this will be the year that 64-bit Windows really takes off.

We’ve getting more 64-bit machines out to developers and testers. The advantages and problems of 64-bit are pretty much the same as two years ago, when I first wrote about the lack of QuickTime support on 64-bit.

32-bit on 64-bit

The first thing you need to know is that 64-bit Windows can all of the 32-bit application with no noticeable performance loss. They are not emulated. However, Windows 64-bit no longer runs 16-bit dos applications, for example those with the .com extension.

There is also a little-known benefit to running existing 32-bit apps under 64-bit Windows. Under 32-bit Windows, applications are limited to using 2 gigabytes of RAM. This can be bumped up to 3 gigabytes with the /3G switch in boot.ini.

Under 64-bit Windows, however, these same 32-bit application can each access 4 gigabytes of RAM. So let’s say you have 8 gigabytes of RAM, you could have 4 gigabytes for your 3D apps, and 4 gigabytes for other applications such as Photoshop, your compositor, ect.

And of course, we have a 64-bit version of XSI which can use all of that RAM.

There are some drawbacks associated with using the 64-bit version of XSI.

First, the QuickTime SDK is not available is not available for 64-bit applications, so reading, writing and capturing to this format is not available in the 64-bit version of XSI. The list of AVI codecs is also very short. You’ll have to use the 32-bit version of XSI to access more codecs.

Secondly, python integration apears to work on Windows XP 64-bit, but apparently there is presently a problem under Vista, which is being investigated.

Finally, you will need 64-bit versions of all shaders and plug-ins you need.

Note that the 64-bit version of XSI isn’t faster than the 32-bit version in simple scenes. The benefit is the ability to use more memory.

Stephen has been putting answers to common 64-bit questions on Softimage Wiki

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