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 waaaay 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 +0000 From: Brent McPherson <[email protected]> Subject: RE: New Softimage|3D plugin: Soft memories To: "[email protected]" 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
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