Facility-Strength Digital Character Animation & Effects

Now with easy migration tools for Maya users, XSI v.5.0 Essentials adds facility-grade support options and industrial-strength features that meet the needs of the most demanding creative teams. Featuring a new gigapolygon core, professional compositing and resolution-independent paint, advanced character rig creation tools, and native support for Avid editors, XSI Essentials handles ten times the detail for next-generation productions and takes full advantage of 64-bit platforms*. Essentials offers enormous rendering power right out of the box with up to six nodes of native mental ray v.3.4 (includes 4 nodes of mental ray Satellite).

Highlights include:

Non-Destructive Modeling, Texturing, Character Set-Up & Rigging
XSI v.5.0 makes life easier by allowing modeling, texturing, and even rigging changes to take place on rigged & animated characters without re-construction of bones, bone weights or shape animation. XSI's unique biped and quadruped character rigs are easy to create and customize, while remaining open and flexible. Easily add new details to rigged or shape-animated characters without the hours of tedious re-work.

GATOR - Property Transfer that just Works
Using the new XSI Generalized Attribute Transfer Operator ("GATOR"), easily transfer any surface properties between models, regardless of complexity or topology. Transfer materials, textures, weights, shape animation - even between rigged character models, all attributes and object data can be transferred. Gator can also be used when combining models, allowing completed, textured, animated models to be merged without losing important characteristics.

Ageia™ physX™ High-Performance Rigid-Body Dynamics
Using the state-of-the-art Ageia™ physX™ physics simulation engine, XSI v.5.0 delivers rock-solid, high-performance physical simulation as much as a 100x performance gain over previous releases. Features include totally new high-precision actual-shape collision handling, and full support for hardware accelerated simulation using the Ageia™ PhysX processor (available separately).

Built-in Illusion Compositing and Paint
Available for both Linux and Windows versions, XSI Illusion delivers full-featured, resolution-independent, 16-bit node-based compositing and paint for 3D artists. In addition to XSI's unique 2D/3D workflow and seamless integration with Render Passes, other key features include retiming, tracking and stabilization and include support for floating point OpenEXR and HDR formats.

Film-quality normal map generation
Going far beyond normal maps, the new XSI 'Ultimapper' tool can generate all kinds of cinematic-quality maps from arbitrarily complex models in just a few clicks – all the while taking full advantage of the sophisticated rendering possibilities of mental ray v3.4. Ultimapper can generate normal, ambient occlusion, difference, light, and albedo maps all with an instant mental ray, DirectX or OpenGL preview directly in the XSI viewports.

Easy migration from Maya
Long acclaimed for its ease of use, with v.5.0 XSI now includes a comprehensive set of migration tools for Maya users, providing menu, keyboard and mouse navigation that lets artists transfer their existing skills and muscle memory to get up and running on XSI in minutes rather than hours. From familiar workflows through to features like the new XSI Keying Panel, artists will be quickly at home, whatever their previous experience.

New Gigapolygon Core Architecture
Advanced Character Rigging & Animation
Ageia™ physX™ Accelerated Rigid-Body Dynamics
Illusion Tree-Based Compositing and Paint
Floating Licenses for Rapid Redeployment
2-CPU mental ray® v.3.4 Rendering
4-node Satellite Rendering
Easy Migration Tools for Maya Users