“SOFTIMAGE|XSI’s newest preferences for Wireframe Highlight Opacity and Point Size display have proved tremendously helpful when envisioning a model more as a surface than a collection of lines and dots,” he explains. “As an artist, that really helps me feel like I’m actually sculpting, not just joining up the dots. The Tweak tool is also a great addition. With SOFTIMAGE|XSI, it’s basically quite difficult to build bad geometry. All the tools are robust and work well.”

For all its strengths, however, for character animators like those at Passion, it is rendering that is most important:
“We have a render farm composed of 60 dual processor machines,” explains Nicholas. “We schedule our renders using an off the shelf render software which we enable through some custom XSI plug-ins. All the scenes and rendered files are organized, so submitting a render to the farm is easy as clicking a button. It’s bliss, mainly because all the pathnames are automatically taken care of.”

Hall is quick to agree with Nicholas:
“There is something about mental ray that gives our renders a unique quality,” he says somewhat cryptically. “I’m not sure what it is exactly, but it’s there. The control of rendering is also brilliant when setting up lighting and texturing. Undersampling the anti-aliasing as the lights are dragged about is a great feature, and when I’m refining textures and shaders, I can post samples at render quality and see how they’ll look in the finished piece. What’s more, because the render region can be scaled up, we can work on textures at a higher resolution, which allows us to see what the shaders are doing and improves the final render. It’s all good.

• For more news from Softimage, visit their website.