educational XSI?

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Longstreet
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educational XSI?

Post by Longstreet »

I can qualify for the educational version of XSI advanced but even at $300 I'm not sure if I want to buy it. I tried to do the foundation demo but it just tells me I have 0 days left of the trial. Anyone know what the limitations of it are, like if I make a model what can I do with it...

I had also thought about the 3dsmax7 version and I became familiar with it with their trial demo.
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Post by :wumpus: »

If your goal is to export to Ogre, choose XSI. I've also heard that doing things like skeleton animation is much more straightforward in XSI (ie, not a fragmented mess of plugins, but a uniform, clearer interface).
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Post by sinbad »

$300 for Advanced is a pretty awesome deal. To be honest, you only need Foundation for working with OGRE, but advanced gives you shedloads of cool stuff for offline rendering, like crowd simulation.

I'm biased because SoftImage have been nice to us, and I'm not an artist but having played with previous versions of 3DS (v5, so take that into account) in the past, XSI has been a lot easier to learn and everything is very consistently implemented. :wumpus: is right - I created, rigged and animated a skeleton in about 15 minutes having never done it before, which was pretty cool.
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Post by litobyte »

The bad of the offer is that only U.S. students can buy it!

I tried to buy it yesterday, but for Eu. citizens only the expensive 450 € Foundation version was avaiable :(

I have the ModTool version installed, and I must say I was astonished when with 3, and I say 3 clicks of the mouse, I had in front of me an human face perfectly modeled automatically created with few "size" parameters.

Softimage is just (as it has always been btw) the best game oriented and also rendering creation package seen on earth.

With these SI XSI prices I think nobody should really buy 3dsmax, when products like lightwave and maya, much much better of it, have now basically the same price.

Buy Softimage, Softimage is gooood :)
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Post by Rixeh »

I wouldn't touch max ever again after trying XSI. ;) I still believe Maya is the superior choice for 'overall' 3D (its NURBS tools destroys XSI, period, plus its Dynamics can't be beat). But for pure game and model design, XSI is great.

I'm sort of expecting to see max slowly disappear. Their one edge over the other packages was really good polytools which made it ideal for game models. XSI's got that wrapped up now -- why bother paying 3 g's for a substandard package?
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Post by zarthrag »

XSI all the way. Maya is nice, but the learning curve is STEEP, not to mention over-priced. I've managed to learn XSI in about a week or so, Maya took months. Besides, the nurbs aren't that bad, and it's *very* straightforward and easy to learn from mistakes - maya leaves you hanging sometimes. My only beef with XSI is that I can't seem to easily find errors in my mesh, dual edges/points, etc. But even that can be worked around with a little patience.
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XSI is very nice.

Post by Wraithdrit »

I'm a programmer who likes to tinker in the art pipeline. I'd have to say having tried the latest version of Max, GameSpace (don't get me started... I know its not in the same league, but ack... so bad), and XSI (mod tool mainly) that XSI is by far the best of the bunch for making an animating a model without pulling your hair out. Their premade biped templates are EXACTLY what I want to start with when modelling.

Anyways, just another 'go XSI!' from an Ogre newbie. I have to say, I looked at Ogre about a year ago, and thought the content pipeline was a bit limited. When I came back to it earlier this week and saw they added an XSI exporter, I was overjoyed.

Gotta save up for a copy of foundation. :)
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Longstreet
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Post by Longstreet »

Thank you for your input. I am seriously considering getting it now. I have tried the free 3d programs and they are pretty limited or I simply can't get them to do anything. I am planning most of my work to be space based. Here is an example that I made during teh 3dsmax demo period: http://andromedaspace.com/AstralGuard.png (obveously not a model for a realtime game). I was very pleased with their tools. But it sounds like XSI is even better.

I have tried the XSI mod tool to get some feel. Many things are different, but I think alsmost everything I need is there.
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Post by dorvo »

Longstreet wrote:Thank you for your input. I am seriously considering getting it now. I have tried the free 3d programs and they are pretty limited or I simply can't get them to do anything. I am planning most of my work to be space based. Here is an example that I made during teh 3dsmax demo period: http://andromedaspace.com/AstralGuard.png (obveously not a model for a realtime game). I was very pleased with their tools. But it sounds like XSI is even better.

I have tried the XSI mod tool to get some feel. Many things are different, but I think alsmost everything I need is there.
That is one nice ship model!
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