Softimage has a new version of their animation program, XSI 5.1 One of the most important aspects of this release is the huge amount of new import/export tools. All screen shots courtesy of Ed Harriss, unless noted otherwise.

Softimage has just released a new version of SOFTIMAGE | XSI 5.1. This upgrade is available to everyone who is already running XSI 5.0. It doesn’t even require a new license. This is one of the best dot release/free upgrades Softimage has put out yet. Judging from the types of tools included, it’s really obvious that Softimage is making an effort to ease the transition to XSI for users of other software, since one of the most important aspects of this release is the huge amount of new import/export tools.

Point Oven
Take Point Oven, for example. Point Oven is a baking system allowing the users of XSI, LightWave, Messiah, Maya and 3ds Max to interchange animation data. This all sounds very interesting, but how does it work?

Point Oven is a suite of plug-ins available from within XSI that allows you to simplify your XSI scenes by baking in vertex and function curve data, and streamline your pipelines by providing data transfer between different applications that also use Point Oven. It does this by taking the position of every vertex at every frame for your geometry and storing it in a file called MDD (Motion Designer Displacement). But, it goes even further. You can also export other types of files using Point Oven: LightWave objects (LWO2) LightWave scenes (LWS) and Messiah scenes (FXS).

Point Oven is now included with every copy of XSI. More than just an import/export tool, it can be used as a point caching system.

For many jobs, Point Oven might even be better than writing out other program’s native file formats. For example, with baked data, the user knows that the animation will be translated perfectly into the receiving application. But if XSI tries to export the entire file, including all the elements used to rig the animation, there’s bound to be some function that the receiving application won’t support, making the export useless.

Point Oven is more than just an import/export tool. It can be used as a point caching system. For example, in very large scenes containing lots of rigged characters, baking the animation to a single object and throwing away the rigs can increase performance dramatically.