Anthony Rossano of Mesmer thinks the fact that DreamWorks, ILM and Valve use XSI confirms its status among students.

After a demonstration of the software for an overcrowded room of curious students, the XSI course at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale immediately filled up during the following day’s registration. There is also a nonacademic Saturday user’s group where students support one another in their growing expertise. It used to be that no one came to the Saturday meeting. Now that the school is offering XSI classes, the user group is “bursting,” Clark contends.

Based on the interest of the student body, more XSI classes are being developed at the Art Institutes. Outside of class, there are online tutorials and specially produced DVDs to help students learn the software’s different tool sets.

Clark goes on: “At Art Institutes, we teach animation from a traditional point of view. Whether 2D or 3D, it all falls back to some very basic skill sets. Now in the industry, especially for 3D or game art that students are going into, we focus on the fact that nobody is going to hold your hand. Every game, every movie, has to outdo the last one. You’ve got to learn how to make these tools do things that have never been done before. A pencil in the hands of Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci is an incredibly powerful tool. It’s no different with computer tools. You’ve got to use your creativity to make this happen.”

The fact is: anyone who knows XSI is able to find a job. In Montreal, 90% of the studios are using Softimage’s software. Even if someone works with another 3D package during their employment, it’s relatively simple to become familiar with a new interface. Lord adds, “As long as one knows the techniques, it’s just a matter of relearning the buttons.”

NAD Centre students have gone on to work at such places as Weta Digital, ILM, Mainframe and Electronic Arts, among many others. One of the more renowned studios to have made the transition to an entirely XSI pipeline is Valve, creator of the popular Half-Life games. Pandemic Studios, which has recently released the remarkable Full Spectrum Warrior title, also produces its games with XSI.

Softimage has made a significant investment in the underlying architecture of its software. Clark says, “Instead of the next version of XSI just adding bells and whistles, XSI 4 is hell and gone from 3.5. It’s incredibly powerful. They’ve essentially got a working game engine in the program. You can be running a game engine in the top left quadrant, and look at what you’re doing in that game in wireframe in your other windows, from other perspectives. You can grab some vertices, add objects, delete them, and it’s happening in realtime in the game engine.”

Clark happily reports, “You don’t need to buy extra plug-ins. It’s all in there. The Softimage team offers updates all the time. Within the program, you can go to ‘surfaces and textures’ and, boom, it’ll go right to their Web site. You can find the latest stuff that’s been done. There’s a lot of support behind this program.”

Students at NAD Centre created these images with XSI. All NAD Centre images © National Animation and Design Centre. Credits: Matthew Rouleau (left) and Rouleau and Gabriel Tremblay (right).