Quickly preview your materials with XSI's new Shaderball system. 

The Render region tool now includes memo cams (much like the viewports) and a "compare last render" feature. Users also now have the ability to draw a render region in every open viewport, even the object view. The render pass channels display in the render region as well.

The render manager provides a convenient view of all the important rendering options for your scene. These options apply to the entire scene, each render pass you define, and the renderer itself. The render manager also gives you quick access to an explorer with its scope set to passes, your rendering preferences and a summary of the render options for your passes.

The rendering core of XSI has been completely revamped. One of the new features, render channels, allows you to output multiple data streams such as illumination components, normals, motion vectors, etc, in each render pass. New shaders make it easy to extract any part of a render tree and output it via custom render channels. XSI 6 also offers integration with mental ray 3.5.6 and includes expanded support for the integration of third-party renderers via a new open rendering API.

The Render Region tool has been significantly enhanced. Image courtesy of Softimage Co. and Avid Technology Inc.

XSI now includes the mental ray car paint shader. This makes life easier for users as they no longer have to download and install it as a custom shader. Also included with this release are the glossy reflection shader, metallic paint shader and the bump flakes shader. Additionally, XSI includes the mental ray architectural library. This set includes architectural material, the physical sun and the physical sky shaders, as well as render-time rounded corner and simple tone mapping shaders.

XSI now supports the Valve texture format (vtf) and the RGBE subformat of memory-mapped files (map) as textures and as images in the FX Tree. Additionally, many nodes in the Fx Tree support unclamped 16-bit floating-point color values. (OpenEXR) Also, the Fx Viewer can preview two nodes at once. You can switch between them, or display them split-screen and wipe to show more of one or the other.

A morph tool called "Elastic Reality" is now integrated directly in XSI's built-in compositor, making it easy for you to deform textures maps and image-based lighting in realtime. Those of you who have used the warp/morph tools in Avid's DS software, are fans of old Michael Jackson videos, Terminator 2, Willow or Quantum Leap know the power of this tool.

Take a trip back in time and do some morphing with Elastic Reality.

Interaction Features
XSI 6.0 has many new selection options too. Surround polygons controls whether you need to completely surround a polygon or not to select it using the Rectangle and Lasso tools. The deselect option in your preferences controls whether you need to simply click or click and drag slightly in an empty area of a 3D view to deselect. The shift key can be used to multi-select a range of elements in transient explorers, such as the one displayed by the Cluster button on the Select panel. When multi-selecting a range of elements, you no longer need to select the first element in the explorer itself. You can also use Ctrl+Shift to select multiple ranges in the explorer.

The Scale, Rotate and Translate tools each now remember the last reference mode used for objects and components separately. This makes it possible to use view for objects and local for components without having to continually reset the reference mode. Similarly, XSI remembers whether COG is on or off separately for objects and components.

There is a new option called Keep Manipulator Visible in 3D View. When the object's center or pivot is off-screen, the manipulator is displayed at the edge of the screen closest to the object's center allowing you to translate an object even if its center is not visible in a 3D view.

Cool New Miscellaneous Features
Delta referencing is a new referencing system that allows production teams to store 3D assets, and the changes made to those assets, in external files that can be assembled dynamically to produce characters, props and environments. Artists modify assets and then update them non-destructively. Any changes made to the objects in a referenced model within a scene are saved in the model's delta. The delta stores the changes for all resolutions of a referenced model and any referenced models that have been parented under it. You can export, import, and apply deltas manually. You can also edit and delete deltas and items within deltas, and even change a delta's target model.