My introduction to 3d was by way of a classmate (Dave Van Hoogstraaten) at school during one of the computer club meetings I would frequently attend. It was 3DS Max by Autodesk. I installed it on my computer, looked at the interface and for about 3 – 5 minutes I just stared at the screen as I have never seen such a complex interface before. After a few years and a few tutorials I was now familiar with 3DS Max and the deficiencies were becoming more apparent with time. I attended a local event where I was introduced to Softimage XSI. Installing and using it for the first time was a bit difficult because the workflow was completely different compared to 3DS Max but in a short while I grew to love Softimage XSI. It was a much more powerful, robust and stable software and decided I would never use 3DS Max again. 3DS Max began as a 2D architectual design software and it was modified to function in the 3D space. The workflow in 3DS Max was linear while the workflow in Softimage XSI was non-linear. Softimage was also extremely stable compared to 3DS Max which would often crash and a corrupted file was all you were left with to show for your experimenting efforts during a tutorial. Combustion was the compositor with a tight coupling with 3DS Max but Softimage had its own compositor built in as well as its own capable simulation/physics engine (which included hair, particles & cloth – Syflex), Mental Ray renderer, crowd simulation and a built-in facial animator called Face Robot.
At one event I attended, I was really blown away by the computing power of Softimage XSI when I saw a short film that was about the making of a documentary “Building the Great Pyramid”. In that video I saw hundreds of characters (the pyramid builders) which were simply copies/instances/clones of a single character but the hundreds of clones would have slightly different facial features along their own animation to appear as a unique independent person helping a move a log, move a stone or pull on a length of rope. I also met Mark Schoennagel (then known as the XSI evangelist) at another event promoting Softimage XSI version 7. What the development team offered with the introduction of ICE Nodes was truly amazing and wold have revolutionized modeling and animation for many years to come.
Below is a sampling of the 3d stuff I have done using Softimage XSI.
Below is the result of a tutorial I did using 3DS Max. The image was provided and I simulated the smoke rising up from the damaged building. I animated the helicopter’s blades and animated the flight path of the helicopter as well.
Below is a simulation using the physics engine called Reaktor in 3DS Max. I had set the plank and the bucket as rigid bodies and the balls as separate objects being affected by a gravity force object in the simulation environment.
Below is the result of another tutorial I did using 3DS Max. The image textures (globe and block graphics) were provided and I modeled and the other components and simulated the point light and added the sound clip (also provided). I’m really proud of this one 🙂
Below is the result of a project I have wanted to do. Each day we walk with no care for the ants we may step on. What if one day we woke up and found that the ants grew larger than humans, what would that look like 🙂 So it begins (using Softimage XSI) with one ant. This is the walk cycle of an ant (Ant was not modeled by me)
We will need many ants to descend on a town of humans to see the chaos so next is the test of a crowd of ants.