Review: Softimage|XSI 1.0
*** This article originally appeared in the May 2000 issue of 3D Magazine ***

Now, just in time for the new millennium, Softimage|XSI version 1.0 is about to enter the world. What are its benefits? Where are the shortcomings? Will it measure up to its illustrious predecessor? LetÕs find out together as we take a look at this much-anticipated tool!

Softimage|3D Extreme users are a generally faithful and hardy lot, but even the most sanguine among them has been sorely tested by the seemingly interminable wait for the release of Softimage|XSI (the product mostly known by its codename, Sumatra). Softimage marketing and sales staff have become almost legendary for their ability, in the face of each competitorÕs advance, to say "Just wait for Sumatra." Meanwhile, the faithful hunkered down over their workstations, cranking away on the venerable and efficient, if somewhat dated, Softimage|3D Extreme.

ItÕs funny how short the memory of the computer graphics business is. For most of the 90s, Softimage|3D Extreme (now at version 3.9) dominated the high end of the graphics business, racking up credits in films like Jumanji, Jurassic Park, Titanic, and others too numerous to mention. But in the last two years, upstart software from companies Discreet and Alias|Wavefront has grabbed the limelight.

Part of this is just the natural cycle of the software industry. New products are born, sold, grow up, and then die as new apps with flashier features are launched. Softimage|3D Extreme bucked that trend for 13 yearsÑan incredible run for a software application, one generally attributable to the tremendous talents and foresight of its original creator, Daniel Langlois.

A New Object-Oriented Structure and Paradigm

XSI is a fundamentally new tool from the ground up. While some core technologiesÑinverse kinematics (IK), the particle system, and the mental ray rendererÑmigrated over from Softimage|Extreme 3.9, they exist now in a fundamentally new and different application structure.

XSI is based on the Microsoft Component Object Model, a powerful object-oriented programming methodology. But it also shares a code base with Softimage|DS (Digital Studio), which is a $150,000 nonlinear editing, paint, audio, and special effects workstation and software. Some parts of DS, like the Animation editor and the Mixer, seem to have ported to SXI without much modification at all. In fact, XSI runs as a process under Windows NT called ds.exe.

The implementation of a Microsoft standard programming practice and the reuse of common code elements already developed for DS made it possible for the Softimage software engineers to construct a more robust, flexible, feature rich program framework in less time [given what you said earlier about the time factor, do we need to modify "relatively short period of time" in any way? With that new foundation, Softimage can now rapidly develop new tools and technologies and integrate them into the existing code base. The net effect is that XSI version 1.0, as it ships, is a huge, deep, and interconnected piece of software.