Overview

SoftImage has been used in many powerfuly realistic movies and commercials. Some of these include the Post Cereals Honey Combs commercial, Starship Troopers,Mortal Kombat: Anhilation, Toy Story, An American werewolf in Paris, and more! This is one of the industris pioneer packages for 3D. SoftImage is now owned by MicroSoft and is available to SGI-Unix and Windows NT. SoftImage has been used for visul effects in films for many years now. SoftImage 3.7 has a retail price of $7,995.... SoftImage 3.7 Extreme has a retail price of about $13,995.

• Dual 300 Mhz
• 128 MB Ram
• 16 MB Realizm Video Card
• 4.3 GB Hard Drive

This system was used to get the full potential out of Softimage and the other programs that were in this rating. Keep in mind that this was originally in the January 1998 issue of 3D-Design as well. This is partly for all you people out there that missed it.

• Inverse Kinematics: Yes
• Bones: Yes
• Nurbs: Yes
• Spline Modeling: Yes
• Depth of Field: Yes
• Dark Lights : Yes
• Volumetrics: Yes
• Flares: Yes
• Glows : Yes
• Available Plug-Ins : Yes
• Midi Control: Yes
• Tablet Support: Yes
• Motion Capture: Yes
• Particle Systems: Yes
• Physics: Yes
• Cartoon Shaders: Yes
• Video Compositing: Yes
• Alpha Channels: Yes

As you can see... Softimage 3.7 has all yes answers. It has almost everything you need to make the best animations around. The only thing that is tough on users is the huge learning curve.

This next section takes the features one step further by rating them 1-10. Ten being the highest, and one being the lowest.

• Interface: 9
• Inverse Kinematics: 9
• Rendering:10
• Modeling :8
• Surfacing: 9
• Lighting: 10
• Volumetric Lighting: 9
• UV Mapping: 10
• Rendering: 9
• Charactor Animation: 10
• Difficulty: 9
• Included Plug-Ins: 7
• 3rd Party Plug-Ins: 5
• Particle Systems: 10
• File Management: 9
• Conversion Utility: 8.5
• Nurbs: 9
• Working Environment: 10

Details about Effects and Features

Lighting Effects and Volume Lighting: The Lighting and Volumetric Lighting in Softimage 3.7 is a very high end feature. softimage has a Lighting F/X director for Volume Lights, also its extremely powerfull atmospheric effects through the ever so powerfull Menatl Ray Renderer.

Particle Systems: More powerfull than both the 3D Studio Max and the Lightwave particle systems. Softimage has its own that lets you control collisions, ad obstacles, create electric and magnetic fields, bring in gravity, flocking and so much more. You can also duplicate just about any particle system in Softimage to look like one made in 3D Studio Max 2 or Lightwave 5.5.

Charactor Animation: Softimage's abilty to create animation in any way is superb to most packages. you are able to constrain a bone to a series of vertices and weight the neighbor vertices is a wonderfull feature. You can also hook up a midi unit through the computer game port, and interactively control a charactors motions. all of Softimages charactor animation are already set...for example...if you have a 2D IK chain all of the inverse kinematics are already set. There are many more capabilities for charactor animation than what we have mentioned. Hear what others have to say!

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