[rescue] People with SGIs

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Jun 07, 2002 at 05:44:36PM -0400, Kurt Huhn wrote:
> > Things are starting to be a bid affordably now, aren't they?
> > 
> 
> Hmmm.  Atractive pricing - the $1200 is about in line with Rhino (which
> doesn't have a great renderer).  If BRL-CAD sucks, Softimage might be a
> good alternative...
> 
> Anyone used Softimage?  How does it compare to others?

I used SI back in the early 3.9 days (when P3 Xeons were brand new and
the Wildcat 4000 was the greatest video available for a PC).  It is a
good modelling program (except for lacking Subdivision surfaces).
Other people reguard it as having very good NURBS.  I thought the
NURBS were fine.  Far better than 3DS Max 2.0's NURBS.  It was (and
probably still is) the absolute best program for doing polygon
modelling. 

It is most highly regarded as an animation program, and it is very
good at that.  Until Maya had a few versions out, Softimage 3D was
considered the greatest general animation program available (Houdini
still had an edge in some areas).  It is fine to just go an animate
something with it, but for best results, you really have to spend a
lot of time doing character rigging.  But that is the case with every
program available.

Now, at this point, I'm not sure how the plugin interface compares with
Maya or Max, but there were a number of good plugins, particularly for
procedural animation.

The default softimage render is pretty hohum.  The Extreme version
comes with Mental Ray.  There are also several tool kits (at least one
of which is free) for interfacing SI with renderman compliant shaders
(like BMRT).  In general, SI's data importing and exporting is
amazingly great.  This earned it a lot of support from game developers
back in the day (now days Maya is more popular, presumably due to more
flexible plugins making it easy to test your models in the game inside
of Maya, etc).

The texturing here is great, including a built in texture paint system
that allows you to paint right on the models.

I believe that the standard version has no particles.  The extreme
version has particles, but they are wierd (and extremely fast,
especially when talking about millions of particles in a scene).  I
seem to remeber hearing something about a free particles plugin
though.

In short, if you can't afford Maya, then this is the next best thing.
I'm going to be thinking seriously about buying it.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd