WHAT????? ILM using SoftImage??
 

I always thought they used maya. ran accross the post last night half asleep. Is softimage actually better than maya?? oh boy, there goes another $12,000......

Maya is the alround best but big studios like ILM dont make superb effect in 1 package. They may modelling in one, make animations & dymanics in another and rendering in another...etc

I read the same thing! Doesn't that suck?
Brian

I think they just got rid of all the softimage 3d license and upgraded to XSI. That's all. No big deal.

Thats cool. I just skimmed thru the article on cgchannel awhile ago, didn't really read it, I was worried for a little bit. :)
Brian

the reason they use XSI is just as roach said, SI3D was their main animation program

I believe its not the software that matters...its actually the artist... the artistic approach and work...i have seen work of alot of artists..who do awesome in even tiny little softwares...
and offcourse big animation houses use a combo of differenct softwares packages for different purposes....

shoaib, your right on the money

And as Nem pointed out, they had been using softimage3d and I believe that they announced they were switching to xsi from softimage3d, not that they were throwing out all the other software they use.

If you think about this though.. ILM hasn't won an Oscar for visual effects in two years... Winners were ESC(or was it Manex) for Matrix and Weta for LotR whose main package is Maya :) But like shoaib said, it's the artist, not the software :)

this might be a bit contraversial, but i can understand why ILM chose to use XSI for their animation, because it's animation tools are so much better than mayas, and workflow is speeded up because of that. i reckon maya really does excel in dynamics and nurbs/subd modelling tho

ILM used SI|3D for all the character animation in SW: episode 2. They have merely upgraded to XSI. ILM use pretty much every 3d app out there, even used eletric image for the Pod race (it was just the craches that were done in Maya)

i just dl'd the XSi EXP and i know it abit off the subject but they went to out do the PLE and i think they blew it out of the water but i still use my PLE cause you have to run XSI in like 1200 by 1000 screen size and it kills my eyes but the over all program isnt to bad --
do you recon the next version of maya will have a model library cause ive seen it in cinema 4d and now xsi i was waondering if you guys thought they would include it ?
--
o 1 more what version is mental ray up to cause they got 3.1 as the renderer for XSI

if by model library you mean a load of prebuilt models that comes with the program then highly unlikely
the reason A|W didnt include models and scenes etc was cos it was meant to be a high end app and they expect the user to create everything themselves :) or so i read somewhere

HI,

Yeh I read the article a while back also at xsi base.

From what I read and heard, the character animators at ILM have so much invested in Softimage 3d (soft, the old version prior to xsi) in R&D and user experience that they thought it wise to stay with Softimage and move onto xsi.

ILM has also formed some alliance with Mental Images creaters of U guessed it 'Mental Ray'. This is I believe another reason ILM chose xsi as its main character package.

As for workflow, well..............
Not to start a software war or anything.

Have used (worked through tuts and played with somewhat) xsi for about 6 months now.

xsi has no set driven key command. The closest thing it has is link with and link multiple. Which is an absolute pain to setup.

Animation playback is not in real time (for similar scene in Maya = Real time).

xsi has some great features but on the whole feels like the poor cousin of Maya.

Having said all this xsi has some really cool features that would be very welcome in Maya such as:

coloured joint skin weights to show the weight mix on all points.

weight curves on the actual 'clip' in their version of the non linear animation mixer. It is really helpful to see the actual weight 'f' curve displayed on a clip so you can visually see its contribution to the mix of clips.

Very, very fast SubD's with excellent proportional modelling tools.

xsi's verion of IPR supports GI, FG, Caustics, raytracing, particles, volume effects, motion blur, DOF, blah, blah, blah. Iv'e also had it running (their version of IPR) for 2 days straight at production quality doing HDRI work and not a single crash.


Things for AW to think about.

But, I still love Maya!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

re Jim

Although Softimage is great and all Maya is better in most cases. The fact that they used Softimage instead of XSI is because they have used it for ages, when Soft was the only good software for character animations... They had all kinds of special software written for it too... It's not easy to change software when people have been using it for ages. The proof is that they didn't change to XSI even if it has been out for over 3 years.

But except for the character part most of the other stuff is done in Maya. I saw a 1 hour seminar at the 3d festival when Sean Shur from ILM talked about the making of Episode 1 and most stuff was done on Maya. For the space battles they used Electric Image and for the characters like Jar Jar they used SoftImage. But all the rest, including the WHOLE Podracing sequence Tolerate, they used Maya!