The enveloped character.

6. Scripting
XSI already supports VBScript, JavaScript, PerlScript and Python on the windows platform. But users that needed Python on Linux were stuck. Softimage hired Mark Hammond, the ActivePython creator, to port Active Python to Linux. There is a relational view that allows for two script editors to sit side by side. It is called “Script Editor — Dual Pane.“ It is great when you need to compare scripts, as it shows two script editors side by side, with one log window below. Finally, the user now gets notified when a script file that is being edited, changes on disk. A prompt is displayed asking user if they want to reload script. This allows user to use an external script editor and keep the script file in synch.

7. Rendering
This new version 3.3 of mental ray provides some much needed improvements. One of the most impressive is called rapid motion blur. Over time, mental ray motion blur has gotten marginally faster. However, with this release it jumps far, far ahead of where it was before. Also notable is the inclusion of detailed shadow maps, speeding your production up in much the same way that RenderMan’s deep shadow maps do. Anyone that does a lot of final gathering work will welcome the inclusion of final gathering preview. This allows for renders to quickly show an approximation of the scene before it shows the final version. With the new metashaders system, XSI shaders can now be written to work with multiple renderers, and the new XGS display will even allow third-party renderers to have dedicated interactive preview windows directly in XSI. You could set up a rendertree for mental ray and use that same tree to render via NVIDIA’s CG shading language. The BSP maximum memory option sets the maximum amount of memory to use for building BSP trees (regular and shadow). This can help if a scene is using extraordinary amount of memory for BSP trees while rendering. There have been some enhancements to toon shader such as added switches that allow ink to be drawn in output frame buffers (normal, depth, motion, tag). Toon now integrates a fisheye effect with toon lens.

Scaling the icon for the global SRT.

There is a new hemispherical (Fisheye) Lens Shader. This shader simulates a hemispherical (fisheye) lens capable of rendering a 180-degree field of view with characteristic hemispherical distortion typical of real-world fisheye lenses. There is a new improved workflow in the render tree for inserting and using conversion shaders within property pages. (invert, color to scalar, etc.) The workflow has been modified to make inserting such conversion node easier, and also to make it more direct to navigate to the other shaders without having to bother with the conversion shaders on the way.

There is a new concept called texture layers that is used to simplify the blending of images/shaders/shade trees. It uses compositing techniques to provide new and easy control over creating and editing texture layers. The XSI Graphic Sequencer gives the user the ability to perform display callbacks. These are callbacks that can be called at different places in the display pipeline. They are useful for things like custom displays such as HUDs and scene level effects (such as fog, background image/colors). XSI 4.0 also adds a new DirectX9 display mode for displaying DirectX 9.0 realtime shaders. There is a new renderer option in the rendering options. You can now choose between mental ray, CG, OpenGL and many other options.