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Softimage Co., a subsidiary of Avid Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: AVID), has unveiled version 3.0 of the SOFTIMAGE|XSI software.
This latest version of the industry's leading 3-D nonlinear production environment is already receiving praise from beta testers worldwide for its performance, workflow and feature enhancements across the complete range of integrated modeling, animation, simulation, rendering and compositing toolsets.
Driven by the requirements of the world's most advanced and demanding film, game and broadcast production pipelines, this latest version of the SOFTIMAGE|XSI software offers artists and developers across all industries the ability to work interactively with significantly larger data sets, giving them the ability to work with more complex characters in larger numbers, more static scene elements of greater detail, and more effects of greater complexity. This new release also includes powerful new features and toolsets for expanded creativity, increased efficiency and accelerated productivity across the full range of production workflows.
Coinciding with the release of SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.3.0 software, is a new crowd simulation toolkit that introduces digital character choreography and direction to the 3-D effects industry.
The toolkit is a sophisticated behavioral animation and crowd simulation system that incorporates full-featured behavioral scripting, visual state-graph editing and dynamic motion synthesis.
The new crowd simulation subsystem, already used by top animation and effects companies in the industry on films like "The One," "Napoleon," and "The Scorpion King," offers a production-proven, high-performance and interactive simulation pipeline for automating behavior for interactive objects, such as flocking, swarming, or 3- D characters in a crowd. With these new features, users can quickly build simple to highly sophisticated multi-object animations involving up to thousands of characters for pre-production visualization and direction to final production, while maintaining the ability to tweak and perfect the results at any time.
"When Softimage showed us the new crowd tools, I decided right there and then it would be the platform for us," said Jason Barlow, lead character animator at R!OT. "We used it...