Check it out at www.softimage.com
Foundation is a great deal!
That is an amazing deal.
I’d say that makes XSI the cheapest of the big boys (they just undercut LightWave, the previous best deal, by $1000).
While it is an excellent deal since XSI is a top-notch product, I understand that this version of XSI is non-upgradable (meaning you cannot get a discount to upgrade to a higher version or to a newer version). Even so, it is a great price for this piece of software.
I would pay this for the XSI render engine (MentalRAY) alone!
What an outstanding Deal!
well, looks like I put off my processor upgrade for another month… I GOTTA HAVE THIS!
anyone in game development buying GameSpace now would be extreamily foolish! for about the same price you can buy XSI and Milkshape, and have same tools for importing to games PLUS you get a render engine!!
This Deal is realy hard to believe… I am going to go and read the fine print before buying…
If animation
Rendering
and modeling packages are all included this will be the best 3d deal I have ever seen !!
thanks for bringing up this topic 
I may own this tomarrow!
mental ray isnt that great of a renderer. infact, its really slow, and to get good displacement results its almost a science of its own.
Foundation is missing some important Character tools
its Cloth tools are a complete joke.
its modelling is nice if you havent used any good modellers. otherwise it will bug the living hell out of you.
its not bad for the price. but its not THAT amazing.
Ambient-whisper, I’ll be interested to find out if you’re right about this. Mental Ray did seem a little slow, but then I also admit I wouldn’t have a clue how to tweak it. Are you sure you do? Anyway, it certainly has a litteral truckload of options, meaning that creating a rendering solution that both looks solid and runs quickly on a single cpu computer isn’t that hard a thing to do. It’s a shame the manual is all over the place, otherwise I’d jump right in a have a try at displacement. From what I have seen, it doesn’t seem too complex.
What I’d really like is a better rendering solution than the one I have in Truespace, which although isn’t too bad, doesn’t allow for much control, especially over things like lighting, or shaders.
The cloth tools don’t worry me- I’m looking at tools for game model creation. I also use Poser for basic cloth, and for basic no-fuss animation. Other than that, I don’t need much.
It’s modelling seems fairly good. I’m going to keep testing it more over the next month to see if it allows for much more than I can already do in Wings.
I like the clone tool much better in XSI than in wings… with it you can set it up to slightly rotate objects… so makeing curved and spiral staricases is a snap…
also in wings we cant animate things…
After I purchase XSI I still plan on useing wings for my modeling… Wings is just my favorite modeler…
Mental ray is very slo on most systems… BUT I have a SMP system… and with SMP turned on it is fast enought to keep my intrests…
My favorite thing about XSI is the Cross platform ability… I own a 64 bit system wich is totaly useless in windows right now… Sure it is fast and can work in SMP in windows, But I get 40% speed boost running applications in Fedora core2-64 BIT when rendering things in truespace (under WINE) and yafray…
they are realy cool about the cross platform stuff ,and offer tech support for even people who are running unstable/experemental versions of X. I also own an ATI radeon 9800 graphics card wich is not very linux compatible… in the drivers from ATI there are special enhancements just for XSI and Maya… the enhancements are very good and worthwhile.I get teh same preformance in windows and linux versions of XSI…
for people who are developing games this is a dream come true, profesional tools for the price of the childrens toy gameSpace. plus you get a rendering engine, profesional animation tools, and your choice of platforms to run it on. and best of all you can join the forums and talk to the pros…
I can definately see why big game companies have chosen this product over 3ds, lightwave, and maya. and especialy truespace/gamespace…
Price (if anyone buys truespace after reading this they are totaly mad)
Support/free access to comunity forum with company peoiple awnsering questions.
Choice of OS platform to run it under
Linux/Unix driver support directly from Nvidia and ATI (maya and 3ds have this too)
SMP
Friendly to 64-bit opperating system (still 32 bit,and some bugs as can expected)
Plugins to export to a few game engines right out of the box
import/export of popular formats
nice animation tools…
All for same price!!! no plugins to buy, no charges for basic tutorials, the manual is intact with all diagrams (truespace removed all diagrams from manuals after they started selling video tutorials, Coincidence? I think not )
Can someone else show me a package that dose all this , for within 200$ of the XSI price? I also am a truespace refugee, this is going to be a great addition to my toolbox…
see, thats the thing. even with smp its not THAT much faster ;/ im kinda dissapointed in recent hardware thats out there claiming its godly in speed. because its very little faster than what i got, except i paid a fraction of the price.
anyway about MR being slow and tweaking it. yes, we got it to work much faster than default. but when comparing it to renderman or vray. its almost infinitely slower when you use displacements and hair type of stuff. even Turtle appears much much faster, and its easier to tweak.
I ran a few tests last night and I have to agree with Polaris30- the general modeling toolset is quite good. I think for me this is a strong package, since I’m mainly after it for greater control over game work, something which Truespace (even though the best program available for setting up a scene in two mintes and rendering) falls short on, with substandard UV tools. Also, the training DVDs sound fantastic. I think I can live with Mental Ray’s slightly slower speeds. I’m not going to render anything huge, and if I do, I’ll be splitting things up with the multipass system anyway, so it doesn’t bother me too much. At least it’s quality of rendering is right up there with the best of them.
Ambient-whisper, I like how you say, “even Turtle appears much much faster, and its easier to tweak.” I’d expect as much. Turtle is the latest and greatest, and a single commercial license costs twice as much as this whole package. It’s crazy to say “even Turtle”.
While I can’t speak to the speed of MR, I can tell you that the sales people over at Softimage did say there will be an upgrade path to Essentials and Advanced (namely, paying price - Foundation), and future XSI versions will have a Foundation version at a similar price.
Also, the character stuff missing is the preset advanced rigs and some features that weren’t even in 3x. We were told that the functionality is in no way restricted, just some automatic functions are missing.
However, hardware may be an issue. Having a lower end video card (i.e. ATI Radeon) may create problems.
EDIT: Just noticed the comment about the ATI 9800 having enhancements. That’s cool. I guess ATI is trying to address the issues.