RE: New Softimage|3D plugin: Soft memories

[Matt Lind]

No clean room required.

Softimage|3D runs on all versions of Windows, including Windows 10.  However, 
the FlexLM license server only runs on Windows XP or earlier (because something 
changed in windows 7 with regards to addressing the parallel port for the 
dongle.  There are options to address COM1 or COM2 instead, but I didn’t try 
that).  Therefore, you can install Softimage|3D on windows 10 and use it for 
short stints until the license server is polled and you get kicked out.  The 
longest stretch I’ve been able to do that was ~15 minutes (average is ~5 
minutes).  The application is very zippy.  If you have an SSD, installation is 
literally less than 30 seconds – faster than you can read the ‘new feature’ 
banners on the progress bar screens .

If you have Windows 7, you can run Softimage|3D inside of ‘XP Mode’ of the 
Windows Virtual PC (both of which are still downloadable from Microsoft), but 
licensing is a real PITA because the address to the dongle is anything but 
intuitive.  The only functional issue I ran into was rendering with mental ray 
as it always attempts to use all available processors.  My main computer has 8 
cores but I’m only licensed for 2.  If mental ray finds more than you’re 
licensed for, rather than limit itself to the licensed number, it aborts 
rendering.  One workaround is to render to .mi2 files and limit the number of 
processors via ray2.exe command line options, but preview renders inside SI3D 
will still be affected by this issue.  The workaround for that is, again, 
render to .mi2 file, then pipe the render into mental ray’s imf_disp.exe to see 
it on screen interactively.  Another possible workaround is to figure out how 
to get the satellite rendering to work as that adds more processors to your 
license pool.  If you don’t render with mental ray, then it’s a non-issue.  
Everything else works as expected.

To develop the “Soft memories” plugin, I ended up installing Softimage|3D on my 
older Dell precision workstation with dual Xeons (deactivated hyperthreading in 
BIOS) running on Windows XP SP3.  In this setup, Softimage|3D runs flawlessly 
other than it’s own native bugs.  Modern day Nvidia graphics cards certainly go 
a long way towards providing that pleasant experience as I no longer crash 
using icon mode in the file browsers, or other stupid stuff that used to plague 
users back in the day.  If you run on Windows XP, you’ll need XP SP3 or else 
you’ll get flakey behavior with mental ray (threading issues).  If you want to 
develop plugins, you’ll need MSVC++ v6.0 (Professional edition) and build them 
using make files.  Believe it or not, you can still buy it on Amazon, Ebay, and 
other places around the net.  I got my copy for $35.

In terms of performance, SI3D is wy faster than XSI for similar tasks 
inside the UI (I attribute this to a simpler and limited UI framework).  
Especially in the area of animation playback as looping is seamless, and 
ability to scrub/stop playback is responsive and silky smooth.  Now I 
remembered why I used to enjoy animating, and similarly why I lost that passion 
when moving to XSI.  You tend to forget that over the years.  Don’t get me 
wrong, I enjoyed using XSI for all things SDK, rendering, modelling, and many 
other tasks, but I never could get excited about animating in XSI.  The looping 
glitch combined with the extra workflow steps to access certain editing 
functions, lack of ‘actions’ in dopesheet, plus ruining of Quickstretch (which 
I used heavily in SI3D) all contributed to that.

One area where Softimage|3D shows its age: anything that hits the hard drive is 
magnitudes slower than XSI.  Especially saving scenes as all pieces are 
separate files and versioned.  Ugh.  Even on modern hardware that process is 
still dog slow.  Switching to single-file scene files in XSI was the right call.

Lastly, after digging through all of SAAphire and extracting everything I could 
to write the plugin.  My impression is many of the core principles of 
Softimage|3D were carried over into XSI, but wrapped into new UI and had their 
data structures massaged a bit to be more uniform/congruent.  Almost everything 
in Softimage|3D had an equivalent in XSI even if it was just a terminology 
change (eg; Named Selections → Groups, Hierarchy Prefix → Model namespace,  …). 
 Am I close in that assumption?  I say this because back in the day we were all 
told XSI was a complete ground up rewrite, which gives the impression that even 
fundamental principles are written from scratch.


Matt




Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2016 09:23:26 +
From: Brent McPherson 
Subject: RE: New Softimage|3D plugin: Soft memories
To: "softimage@listproc.autodesk.com"

I'll admit that it took me a surprisingly long time to realize this is a plugin 
for Softimage|3D and not Softimage|XSI!

Does Softimage|3D still run on modern hardware or do you have a clean room 
somewhere running Windows NT on a Pentium? ;-)
--
Brent

RE: New Softimage|3D plugin: Soft memories

[Brent McPherson]

I'll admit that it took me a surprisingly long time to realize this is a plugin 
for Softimage|3D and not Softimage|XSI!

Does Softimage|3D still run on modern hardware or do you have a clean room 
somewhere running Windows NT on a Pentium? ;-)
--
Brent

From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Matt Lind
Sent: 29 July 2016 23:11
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: New Softimage|3D plugin: Soft memories

For immediate release:

The newest plugin “Soft memories” is now available for Softimage|3D.  Soft 
Memories exports Softimage|3D scenes to an XML-like file format so data can be 
archived to remove dependencies on Softimage|3D to be able to view and 
manipulate content.  Data is stored as XML to make it easy to develop importers 
to another 3D application or viewer without issues of binary or version 
compatibility.  All scene elements accessible by the SAAphire SDK are supported 
including 3rd party plugins and shaders.

The plugin was developed to find a solution to a common problem digital artists 
face – how to archive data for a portfolio but still make it accessible when 
the host application is long obsolete and no longer functional, or when the 
developer is no longer in business?

The plugin is available for Softimage|3D v3.9.2 on Windows appearing in the 
Tools module under the “Export” menu.

Special 1999 rollback price: $1,499.99 USD.

For purchase, contact Matt Lind at 
matt.l...@mantom.net

A separate plugin to import the archived data into Softimage|XSI is under 
development, but details on pricing or availability are not known at this time. 
 Import into other applications may be considered.


Matt





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