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View Full Version : New to the forum - Shape animation?


ArthurDent
06-02-2008, 05:59 PM
Hello! Ages ago, I was a member of the Softimage 3D (3.7) newsgroup. Since then, animation has dropped off for my company. We re-upped to XSI 4.0, but have left off updating since, again, animation has been slow.

To begin, I vastly preferred the old methods in 3D. I find that things that seemed simple were simple, while working in XSI has never been very straight-forward. My current example is - I'm trying to shape animate a simple cylinder (aortic aneurysm - I'd like it to grow on-screen). First I tried just doing it the old-fashioned way. I created key shapes, etc. to no avail. Then I tried following the manual. Even the simple example in the manual doesn't work, let alone my slightly more complicated object. I'm almost to the point of generating a start and end image, then morphing in Elastic Reality!

It seems stupid to have to struggle for such a simple animation, I'm wondering if this was a known issue, and if somebody has an effective tutorial. Thanks in advance! chris

3DMastermind
06-13-2008, 01:47 PM
I find XSI compared to SI3D is light-years ahead :)
You may have a tough time because you're on V4.
Shape management is usually done in the "shape manager" which makes shape anim/keying quite easy to manage and very flexible.
Also, I don't know if the tweak tool was there on V4 which would help alot for shaping.