Syflex partners with Softimage to provide a free license of cloth simulation to every one of its users.

Other Cool Stuff

• Users of XSI Advanced will get a 4 CPU mental ray v.3.3 rendering license. 1 advanced and 1 batch render, where each license can unlock 2 CPUs for rendering on dual processors.
• More robustness, performance and functionality because of the revamp of the override architecture
• “Visible in render” in the light property page makes the area light visible in the render output based on its color which is useful for making lights show up in reflections.
• New materials library loads a lot of new sample materials and is also a good system for storing current materials making it easier to re-use and deploy across distributed teams.
• The material and texture explorer is a new two-pane view that displays all of the materials, textures and shaders used by the objects in your scene.
• The leader in cloth simulation, Syflex, has partnered with Softimage to provide a free license of cloth to every one of its users
• You can now do smooth scrubbing, in a variety of modes (direct synch-to-frame, realtime playback, vari-speed or user-defined rate).
• Autokey has a new option to determine when autokey will result in keys being created/edited.
• When the phoneme key display mode is enabled, keys that belong to “weight” fcurves (notably shapekey weights) will be displayed in an alternate way, allowing you to see which key has an effect where on the dopesheet over time.
• The smoothing deform operator can be used to control the bulge effect at the joint.
• The construction modes allow you to adjust anything on your character at any time.
• LOD controls allow you to generate several versions of an object at different levels of detail.
• The Smooth operator is a general purpose deformation that removes spikiness and other high-frequency detail.
• Welding and Un-welding points have been made a lot more easier. There is also an option to detach the polygons as a single unit or individual polys.
• The feature called dicing works exactly like Effect>Subdivision from Softimage3D.
• The preferences panel has been completely redesigned and is much more stable
• 4.0 comes with a new application, called XSICabs. It provides Softimage an easy way to resolve bugs in XSI.
• You can lock any node or possible to “tag” parameters.
• The plug-in manager takes care of loading self-installed plug-ins at startup.
• Avid 3D is geared toward video editors. It is a drag and drop, text and logo application based on XSI and mental ray rendering.