When Polytrans did have support for Softimage|3D, but I think Okino dropped
support for it years ago. Even if it was available, I think you still
needed to have a copy of Softimage|3D installed to do work as it needed to
source licensing.
Polytrans is currently only showing support for dotXSI. You'd have to go
back into Softimage|3D and export all your scenes to dotXSI to use that
route, and it didn't support all that much as SI3D's dotXSI was one of the
first versions and really primitive. I don't think it's compatible with the
dotXSI that is currently known as crosswalk. If memory serves, the SI3D -->
XSI translator did a better job as I remember trying both.
In my case I need certain features to be handled differently (BSpline
patches, MetaClay, etc.) as well as have some translator bugs fixed as
crashes are not allowing certain scenes to convert. The problem scenes open
just fine in Softimage|3D, but the translator crashes, or Softimage|XSI
crashes for whatever reason when the data is manipulated.
Ideally, I'd like Autodesk to fix the translator bugs and put the translator
back into Softimage so we don't need to hang onto older versions of XSI and
Softimage|3D. I'd prefer to have just the most recent version of Softimage
on one computer and be done with it. I don’t want to be forced to hang onto
an older computer, software, and so on just to support content in my
portfolio. The only reason I have to do this is because all the conversions
I did on the data years ago was recently lost and I have to do it again.
My tentative plan is to write a Softimage|3D plugin to export scenes to text
files. I designed a generic XML file format a number of years ago to make
Softimage scenes and models agnostic of XSI version in use. I was
considering exhuming that project and exporting the Softimage|3D data into
that format so it could be imported into another 3D application provided a
script or plugin is written to read the data. This is all dependent on my
ability to get a Softimage|3D plugin successfully compiled, of course.
Otherwise I'd have to resort to some hackery involving bin2Ascii.exe,
hrcConvert.exe, or figuring out how to parse the binary files myself. The
SAAphire and DKit documentation is rather sparse and not 1:1 with the
provided examples, so that's not an appealing route.
Matt
