The material and texture explorer offers the user a view that displays all of the materials, textures and shaders used by the objects in a scene.

3. Animation
There is a new type of constraint called slider. The slider constraint connects two objects (active or passive) and constrains them so that they move relative to each other along a particular line. Imagine that each object has a small hole drilled through it and is mounted on a frictionless rod, like a bead on a needle. The built in rigs have improved a lot. You can now move the toe and the entire foot will move with it as well. You additionally get components that you can simply add to your rigs, such as fingers, hands and tails. There are also more options that enable skin sliding, better shadow rigs and ghosting, which is very valuable for accurate animation. The new concept, known as timeline-based editing, allows XSI to dock several animation editors together in such a way that they will share the same master timeline, and thus be completely visually synchronized together. This makes it a lot easier to work with multiple editors on animation data, especially for synchronization work.

In addition to the normal ghosting, XSI has IK/FK ghosting as well. You can ghost the display of both the FK and IK solution of a chain, in addition to the blended configuration. It is now possible to convert euler rotation fcurves into quaternion fcurves (both back and forth). This allows editing rotation animation using the quaternion fcurves, in the fcv editor or dopesheet. In the fcurve editor there is a new “Quaternion Keys” toolbar. This toolbar is used to tweak the tension, continuity, bias and spin parameters at keyframes. XSI now has the ability to display an audio waveform in the background of the function curve editor. This is useful for synchronization of animation with audio and makes lip synching a lot easier. Action sources now have a storage option with a filename as well. This now allows actions to be saved externally, and shared between scenes. The animation mixer has some new powerful cycling tools for building all kinds of cycles out of straightforward animation or MoCap.

Authors Aaron Sims and Michael Isner concentrate on mastering character creation in this new instructional book.

4. Compositing and Paint tools
Vector and raster paint is one of the best features for users of XSI’s built in compositor. It is a resolution independent, multi-layer, 16-bit, XSI-scriptable raster and vector paint module based on proven technology from Eddie Media Illusion. With the new tools you will not only be able to animate paint strokes or shapes (to erase wires, make spot corrections, frame-by-frame correction and clone/merge on video/image sequences), but you will also be able to track objects in the source footage and share that information with your composite or objects in your scene. The compositor has had a big overhaul. Much has gone into making it work faster and use ram more efficiently. It does heavy temporal caching of file inputs. If there is plenty of ram available to the compositor, it is possible that files being composited from disk are only accessed once. The new 2D tracking tool in the compositor allows 2 or 4 point tracking for stabilization or corner pinning. And a FX Tree SDK provides support for “UFO” plug-ins. UFO stands for “User Function Objects.” This API allows writing plug-ins for the FxTree and offers full access to the internal implementation of image plug-ins, with services for parameter definition and validation and access, region calculation, multithreaded processing and implementing viewer interactive tools. Another cool feature is the support for Avid’s digital nonlinear accelerator Mojo. It delivers the power of true realtime effects, realtime D1 input and output.

5. Simulation
Working with the new Rigid-Body Dynamics (RBDs) is simple and straightforward. To create rigid body dynamics, you make objects in the scene into rigid body objects. Then you add forces to create movement (wind, gravity, force, motors, impulse, etc.). The dynamics operator then calculates how rigid bodies move according to forces and to the collisions they have with other rigid body objects. It even works with subdivision surfaces. You can set constraints between rigid body objects to limit a rigid body object to a specific type of movement. Hinge constraints make connected rigid bodies move around an axis that acts as a hinge joint; that is, it provides only one degree of freedom in rotation. Rigid-body objects can be either active or passive. Active objects are simulated by the RBD solver. Passive objects are not simulated, but can be keyframe-animated and also act as collision objects for active bodies. You can manipulate passive bodies during a simulation, providing a way to interact with a simulation environment

Particle goals have been added to 4.0. Goals allow a simulated particle cloud to be attracted by one more or more objects. The goal object can be a polygon mesh, nurbs surface, lattice, particle cloud, nurbs curve or any other object. Each particle is assigned a feature of the goal object to be attracted to.

Using the new Hair Geo shader, you can set the diffuse/ambient/specular color shading and transparency for hair that uses only the geometry render type. This offers better control (via gradient) over shading. You can also add incandescence (glow) for the inner and outer hair edges.