New to XSI Please help?

[qxfnew]

Hi all.
I have been using Maya for two years now, but there are few things in it that bugs me a little, so any way I was trying to figure out if it is possible to use XSI for some parts. Three things:
1. Mental ray option in Maya is very confusing what is the Mental ray integration in XSI like, is it easy to use?
2. Shader configuration, I really like using hardware textures and rendering with hardware when I can, for my work. Does XSI support cgfx format and is it possible to link textures and lights from different parts of software together, and hardware render them?
3. And most important thing, can I import and export my Maya files back and forth between XSI?
Thanks.

[richard-sher]

1. The mr integration in XSI is by far the best out there. Yes, it is easy to use, probably because it is the core renderer in XSI.

2. XSI does support CG. But to what extent, I don't know.

3. Use the dotxsi converter. Read about it here: http://www.softimage.com/connect/xsi Download it here: http://www.bernardlebel.com/others.htm

[atyss]

XSI has two families of shaders:

• mr shaders, for traditional rendering.
• realtime shaders (OpenGL, DirectX and CG), for viewport display and game engines.

Don't worry about mr's integration. When you pick up a shader from list of shaders, it's a shader made for mr. No special setting to fine-tune or so. Several nice features of mr are not exposed, but you have access to them through command line rendering (ie mi2 file rendering).

I don't know exactly about CG shaders. My impression is that beyond the library of CG shaders provided by Softimage that you can install, everything else is up to you.

Cheers
Bernard

[qxfnew]

Thanks,
Well I just got XSI installed on my system, yesterday. It