Hi everyone, I was looking at Softimage XSI Foundation, and then I saw that it was discontinued and the only other version that would be within my price range would be the academic version. Does anyone have the Softimage XSI Academic version? If so, how is it different from the full version? What are the limitations? Also, can it export to .x? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

The Academic version should have all of the features of XSI Essentials except that you can not produce commercial works with it. That being said, why don't you just use XSI Mod Tool, which is free (assuming you're a hobbiest or student and not expecting to perform commercial work with it).

Yes, I'm a hobbiest, and a student.

Does the Mod tool export to .x? If not, is there a way to do it? Would exporting it to a different file type, and importing it into another program, like Blender, that exports to .x, and then exporting it as a .x work?

Yes, it does.

If you'd have googled "XSI Mod Tool supported formats" or looked on the XSI website you'd see this. I don't mean to be a douche or anything, but put at least a minute or two of effort into finding information before posting up here about it. Heck, if you had even actually read the Softimage website you could have answered your own original question.

I'm sorry, I did look at the Softimage website, but I must have looked in the wrong areas, because I didn't see anything about the mod tool and .x files.

Also, last night I googled something like "exporting to .x using Softimage XSI mod tool" (I look at the mod tool a little bit last night), and none of the pages I looked at had anything useful.

So I'm sorry, but I did look but I didn't find anything, that's why I asked.

Edit - The reason I asked my original question was because I wanted verify these limitations with someone who owned the software. It's not that I don't trust Softimage, it's just that I wanted information from more than one source, even if the one source was the company that designed the software.

I'm sorry if I sound defensive, I'm not meaning to.

I appreciate your help. Thanks.

Ryan, I wouldn't bother using free or cheap limited tools if I couldn't afford, or never intended to own the 'real' version of these programs. It's like a trap. What good is learning to use a program that you can never really get anything out of?

trueSpace 7.6 is capable and free.
DeleD Lite is free and is well suited towards environments.
Fragmotion is cheap (20$), and can export animated .x files.

Thanks for the software suggestions Daaark, I'll look at them when I have more time, but thanks a lot.

Like I said before, I didn't mean to sound cross or anything. It is just annoying because we get A LOT of pretty simply questions that can be answered with a few minutes of research. We all miss the obvious sometimes, though [wink]

Quote:Daark
Ryan, I wouldn't bother using free or cheap limited tools if I couldn't afford, or never intended to own the 'real' version of these programs. It's like a trap. What good is learning to use a program that you can never really get anything out of?

Mod Tool is not a "cheap limited tool". It contains everything you need to produce assets that are on par with those found in the current Source and Unreal based games. What it does do is cut out features that you would be using to produce films. Consider the following limitations that Mod Tool has:

* Mod Tool supports only DXFX and CGFX material types. Mental ray materials are not supported.
* Mod Tool supports only polygonal mesh primitives.
* Exported geometry is limited to 64000 triangles.
* The mental ray renderer is used only for Rendermap and Ultimapper. All other mental ray rendering is disabled.
* Maximum resolution for Ultimapper maps is 512x512.
* Images output using the hardware renderer are limited to a maximum resolution of 512x512.

Do any of those interfere with the production of quality game assets? XSI has much more intuitive and powerful features for rigging and animation in particular that none of the applications you listed come close to. Add on top of that XSI has amazing scripting capabilities, including C#, Python,JScript, or VBScript to jump right in. Mod Tool comes with tutorial videos that are pretty good and has built in support for XNA, DirectX, Source, and there are available add-ons for tons of other things, such as Unreal. Considering the fact that it is based on XSI 6, there are crap tons of available resources available for it, because XSI is actually used in commercial game development.

XSI ModTool is for non commercial use only, and they just discontinued the 500$ version of XSI. So yes, it's limited because it's nothing more than a tool that now serves as an advertisement for an unafforable 2999$ (entry level) software.

It's a dead end.