New in SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6.5:

Both SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6.5 Essentials and Advanced software will include more than thirty enhancements that were developed for key customers such as Lionhead Studios, Valve, EA, Animal Logic, Nerdcorps, Pandemic and NCSoft. Some of the new enhancements, which improve production efficiency and meet the specific workflow needs of the game development, visual effects and visualization industries, include:

* HDR (high dynamic range) rendermap support;
* Additional SDK (Software Developer’s Kit) APIs (Application programming interface);
* UV Editing enhancements (2D image data on a 3D model); and
* Enhanced audio support.

In addition, each SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6.5 application delivers specific features designed to meet the needs of target customers:

SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6.5 Essentials – equips artists with the features they need to create compelling 3D characters and content for games, film and television. The Essentials version now includes Hair & Fur, and Syflex Cloth capabilities. The price for Essentials will increase to $2,995 USMSRP; maintenance remains unchanged at $799 USMSRP, and upgrades remain unchanged at $999 USMSRP. XSI 6.5 Essentials will only be available to new customers and customers on active maintenance.

SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6.5 XSI Advanced – enables technical directors and studio IT managers to set up and run a creative animation facility with a robust toolset, including everything in the SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6.5 XSI Essentials package, plus Behavior, a crowd and behavioral simulation system, as well as five additional XSI Batch rendering licenses. The price for Advanced will decrease to $4,995 USMSRP and maintenance will decrease to $1333 USMSRP.

What's New in Face Robot 1.8

Face Robot 1.8 boast key new features that make it easier than ever to deliver compelling, high-quality facial animation performances in record time.
Shape Export System

The all new shape export system in Face Robot 1.8 allows you to export ready-to-animate head rigs that animators can use directly in SOFTIMAGE|XSI or Autodesk® Maya®. Now your technical director can produce cutting-edge head rigs quickly, and pass them on to animators who can work on them using their favorite 3D animation tools!

Improved game export pipeline

In Face Robot 1.5, we brought you a game export pipeline that made it possible to get lifelike facial animation into games using current game-engine technologies like skinning and normal mapping. In Face Robot 1.8, we've made substantial enhancements to the game export tools, especially in the area of auto-enveloping which is now much more accurate.

Built on XSI 6 Core Architecture

Face Robot 1.8 is built on the SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6 core architecture—the same robust platform that provides accelerated animation tools like MOTOR motion retargeting and animation layers; collaborative workflow features like Delta Referencing; and cutting-edge interop tools like Crosswalk.

Now Face Robot users can take full advantage of these features directly in face robot. Great news for animators, who can use XSI 6 animation layering technology to modify and refine motion capture animation without affecting the source data!

New Head Presets

Whether you want to hit the ground running on your next project, or you want to experiment with Face Robot's innovative animation workflows, Face Robot 1.8 ships with 7 new head presets that are ready-to-use out of the box.
23-Part Video Tutorial

To get get you up to speed quickly and easily, Face Robot 1.8 ships with a comprehensive 23-part series of training videos. The series provides an in depth look at the simple 6-step process of creating, animating, and tuning a facial animation performance in Face Robot.

What's New in CAT 3

SOFTIMAGE®|CAT is packed with new features that make life easier than ever for character animators using 3Ds Max. Highlights include:
CATMuscle Integration

CATMuscle—a fully scaleable solution for solving skin deformation problems—is fully integrated in CAT 3. CATMuscle provides you with the tools you need to achieve a smooth, organic skin deformation across a wide range of motion. It's easy to learn, and requires no understanding of anatomy.

CATMuscle rigs can be as simple or as complex as you wish, so they can suit your purposes whether you are working in film or game development.
Rigging

New rigging features include:
Setup Controllers

Layers can now have a setup controller rather than just a setup value. Any complex procedural animation can be configured onto the "Setup" or "Base" controller.

Bones can also contain a setup controller, which is used to drive animation. These controllers can contain procedural animation such as constraints, and script controllers.

Setup controllers for layers and bones are are saved, and loaded with rig presets.
Layer Configuration Baking

Now each layer controller can save a mini clip file that defines all of the settings for that layer.
New Rig Nodes

You can now add extra information, like props, muscle configurations and skin meshes, to rigs. The extra information is saves, merged, and/or deleted with the rigs.
New Rig Saver

A new rig preset system allows you to save rigs by themselves, without their animation.

New CATUnits Position, Rotation, and Float Controllers

These controllers are used to create rigs that resize with the CATRig when CATUnits are changed.
New Inheritance Settings on Bones

Bones now have Inheritance options for Animation and Setup Mode.You can disable position, rotation or scale inheritance for the entire bone, including all layers, using a single toggle.
Layers

New layering features include:
Layer Collapsing Tool

A new layer collapsing tool allows you to collapse layers while preserving source keyframe times, keep constraints, and plot constraints to keyframes.
New Layer Manager

An all new layer manager has been written for complete CATRig layer management. It is both simpler and easier to use than the previous layer manager. Most layer operations can now be applied to many layers at once simply by selecting them in the layer manager.
CATMotion

New CATMotion features include:
Arbitrary Numbers of Feet Per CATMotion Limb

CATMotion now supports arbitrary bones as feet. You can turn any bone that is the child of a limb—a walking stick, for example—into a foot using a simple toggle.
CATMotion Foot Nodes Automatically Placed on Ground Plane

Should your rig's setup pose not place the character's feet flat on the ground (for example, the "Da Vinci" pose), CAT 3 can place them there automatically. Previous versions required the use of large offsets.