Softimage Tutorials

This tutorial will guide you through the entire start-to-finish process of building your ICE tree simulations and rendering the final results, with special emphasis on the concepts and workflows that you can incorporate into your own Softimage projects. We will learn how to create ICE trees and add dynamic forces such as wind and gravity to our simulations, we will learn how textures can be used to drive particle appearance and behavior, we will learn how to incorporate realistic light dispersion and absorption properties into our ICE volume particles, as well as many additional features, techniques, and workflows that will prove to be invaluable to all Softimage users who wish to use ICE tree simulations in their own projects.

We'll start the tutorial by giving you the foundational skills and vocabulary you'll need in order to move around within Softimage, and then we'll jump right into the Modeling section of the tutorial. After completing the Modeling section, you'll get the chance try your hand at Texturing, Rigging, Animation, ICE Dynamics, and finally, Lighting and Rendering your own animation. Our goal is not to weigh you down with technical information, but rather to help you develop good workflow habits and allow you to reach a point where you can be very comfortable using Softimage.

We will start the tutorial by learning how to properly set up and align your Rotoscope images in something like Photoshop. From there, we will learn how to begin importing your Rotoscopes into Softimage, we will learn how to resize and reposition your Rotoscope images within the Softimage viewports to make sure they are properly aligned in all your views, we will learn how to import animated Rotoscopes, as well as other tools and features that will allow you to use image references effectively in Softimage.

We'll begin the tutorial by first covering some things to consider when constructing the control rig. From there, we will set up the wing, step by step, making sure the system we build will be sufficient to the needs of an animator. We’ll also work with custom parameters and expressions to automate certain behaviors so the animator can work faster.

We’ll begin this tutorial by learning the new terms and nodes we have access to, such as the topology data type, modeling ICE Trees, and empty meshes. Next we'll learn about some limitations of the topology nodes by creating an ICE tree that deletes all polygons outside a Null. We'll then begin our main shatter project by creating all the objects and nodes to shatter our own object. Then we'll learn methods of controlling our shatter points and correctly setting the Chunk IDs. Finally we will break our chunks out into separate meshes with a compound we will create using the topology nodes. As a bonus, we will set-up a basic rigid-body simulation and learn how to set the center of mass using a quick custom compound.

Having a solid understanding of the features of mental ray is a crucial step toward becoming an efficient and productive rendering artist in Softimage. We will begin our tutorial by learning several methods for simulating realistic indirect lighting in Softimage, such as global illumination, final gather, as well as Importons and Irradiance Particles. We will also explore the use of caustics to simulate the light patterns created as light passes through refractive surfaces. In addition, we will also explore Image-based lighting techniques, camera and environment shaders, utilizing render passes and render channels, as well as many other tools and techniques that will allow you start rendering high quality work for a multitude of projects.

We’ll begin the tutorial by creating ICE extrusions with curves and strands to create our base stair element. We'll then create copies of our element inside an empty mesh. Then we'll create a control curve, find the transformations at various locations along the curve, and transform our copies to be on the curve. We'll then create a second curve to control other aspects of our copies and package everything into a compound. We'll then learn how to create controls to easily modify our copies without having to understand our ICE tree.

We will be exploring topics such as creating bump-mapping effects, using the Sprite node to add transparency maps to Softimage particles, rendering complex displacement effects using the Vector Displacement Map node, and using the Camera Map node to render 3D objects directly over a live-action background, just to name a few of the nodes we will be exploring.

We will be discussing topics such as creating realistic car paint, exploring subsurface scattering materials to simulate translucent surfaces, overriding shadow color and transparency on individual objects, shading hair strands created in Softimage, rendering soft-shadowing effects using ambient occlusion, as well as many other tips, tricks, and techniques for using the Softimage Illumination nodes.

Understanding how the various lighting tools in Softimage work and behave is a very important skill for anyone who is getting started with this 3D application. In this series of tutorials, we will discuss the different types of 3D lights found in Softimage, and methods for easily aiming and controlling your lights. We will also explore some of the specialized attributes found in certain light types, we will discuss the different types of shadows available in Softimage, we will see how we can add depth and mood to our scenes though the use of volumetric light rays, as well as many other lighting tools and concepts that will help you establish a solid foundation in Softimage.

We’ll start off by covering what ICE is and what it is used for. We'll then take a look at working in the ICE tree so you learn how to use ICE in your own projects. After that, you’ll learn how to add forces to particle and create compounds. To wrap up this project, we'll go over how to work with Strands and Lagoa. This series of step-by-step videos were developed with artists new to ICE in mind so we will be moving at a steady, easy-to-follow pace making sure you understand terms and basic techniques. To view more Beginner’s Guide courses; visit our library where you'll find the largest collection of free, high-quality CG training videos.

Introducing the Beginner Guide to Animation in Softimage. In this course, we will start off by covering some ways we can view animation in Softimage. We will then take a look at how to create and edit keyframes on the Softimage timeline. After that, you will learn about Softimage's Animation Editor. And to wrap up this project, we will go over how to create a quick renders of your animations with captures. By the end of the course, you will understand essential terms and definitions and build a solid foundation for animating in Softimage.

The objectives for this fast-pace, intensive course include successfully transferring data between two ICE trees, create custom particle effects and understand how data flows in Softimage. By the end of this training, you will have the ability to solve these types of ICE problems in your own projects. Before following along with this tutorial, you should have experience using Softimage and ICE as we cover what would normally take hours to accomplish in a shorter span of time. If you are an artist new to Softimage, ICE or Lagoa, we have several courses to get you started.

Introducing the Beginner Guide to Rigging in Softimage. In this tutorial, we will start off by covering the most basic form of rigging, parenting. We will then take a look at how to modify the pivot of an object and how to work with transform groups. After that, you will learn about bones, inverse kinematics, and control objects. And to wrap up this project, we will go over the Softimage enveloping process for skin deformations. By the end of the course, you will understand essential terms and definitions and build a solid foundation for rigging in Softimage.

We will start the tutorial off by explaining what a shading network is, and why is it such a powerful way to work. We will then begin exploring the Material Manager, which is where you will be creating your Softimage shading networks and we will be covering many of the features, the workflows, and the concepts that will allow you to successfully begin creating your own shading networks in Softimage.

We will begin this project by learning how to create Lagoa simulations using the create menu presets. We will then learn about the four essential parts of a Lagoa ICE tree. We will then learn some of the force and accuracy settings we can use to control our simulation. We will then get into the heart of the Lagoa system, the Lagoa Main Material. We spend several lessons breaking down each aspect of the material, as different settings can create completely different looks and particle interactions. We will then learn some tips and tricks for working with Lagoa in Softimage including viewing an ICE cache as it simulates, using the Polygonizer to create a mesh around our particles, and how to use the Lagoa Fluid Shaper to create a more realistic fluid. Finally, we will learn how to apply Cached Sim Post Effects to changed our particle cloud without re-simulating.

This course will provide you with a foundation for camera animation in Softimage. We'll cover everything from creating turntables, to techniques we can use to add more entertainment to our shots by camera animation alone. We'll learn various ways we can rig cameras and even discuss shot composition to make sure the audience knows who the significant players and objects of interest are in our scene. By the end, you'll have the knowledge you need to animate the camera confidently, producing results that can captivate an audience.

This tutorial guides you through the process of creating a Walk Cycle in Softimage. One step at a time, we'll dissect the body mechanics of a walk. We'll learn how to create seamless cycles, we'll also explore ways we can add believable follow-through and weight, and even work with Animation Layers to, in the end, produce a walk that is natural, and that has a little personality.

We'll take a step-by-step approach, constructing a control rig that is solid and animator-friendly. We'll learn everything from proper bone placement and working with constraints, to learning how to utilize some of Softimage's robust skinning tools to remove the fear of painting weights. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have the foundation you need to create your own rigs that produce character performances that are natural and entertaining.

This tutorial is designed for users who are just getting started with rendering in Softimage, so we will not be focusing heavily on using lights, materials or recipes to give your render a specific look. Instead, our focus will be on helping you build a strong foundational knowledge of rendering in Softimage by talking about many of the key tools, features and concepts that every rendering artist in Softimage really needs to be familiar with. We will also learn how to resolve some rendering-related issues that you may encounter, and we will focus very heavily on helping you develop good habits and strong workflow practices that will be extremely beneficial to you as an emerging render artist.

When rigging and animating, it's always nice to have an appealing character to work with. In these tutorials, we'll cover the building of a simple character with emotive eyes and eyebrows which you can then rig and animate. We will look at methods for building the head, body, arms, and legs and methods for connecting them all together. During the modeling process, we will emphasize the use of proper topology and discuss how topology and edge flow can impact the outcome of the rigging and animation process.

We'll begin this project by learning the basic concepts behind ICE such as the main uses of ICE, the basic workflow of ICE and how ICE nodes work together. We'll then learn about the various data types and the importance of context while working in ICE. Once we understand the ideas behind ICE, we will take a few lessons to familiarize ourselves with the Softimage interface. Then we will begin building a particle simulation from the ground up and learn about various ICE nodes and workflows. We'll finish by rendering out an image sequence of our finished particle simulation. This series of lessons was designed to launch someone who has never touched Softimage into being comfortable with the interface and working with ICE. This will allow us to create particle simulations in ICE quickly and easily and begin exploring this powerful platform.

During the course of these tutorials, we will discuss critical rendering topics such as High Dynamic Range (HDR) image-based lighting, tone mapping, gamma correction, as well as color profile management for your various textures. From there we will discuss the process of breaking up our render into multiple passes using Render Channels, as well as learning how to write any type of color information into our own custom render channel buffers. Once we have rendered out our passes, we will learn how Softimage's built-in node-based compositing system can allow us to make significant changes to our rendered result.

When trying to create highly realistic, lifelike characters, the importance of the eyes is often understated. In fact, the eyes are one of the most important aspects to consider when creating characters that truly look and feel alive. During this course, we will learn how to create highly realistic eye textures from scratch using Photoshop, and in a way that gives us a high degree of flexibility and control over the textures' color variations and other details. Once the texturing has been completed, we will jump into Softimage, where we will discuss shading and rendering techniques that can give the eye a highly realistic final look. Along the way we will be exploring many additional tips, tricks, and workflows that you will be able to use both in Photoshop and in Softimage to help create more believable, realistic eyes for your characters.

In the world around us, much of the light that we perceive comes from indirect illumination, or light that bounces off other surfaces to illuminate our surroundings. One of the ways that mental ray allows us to incorporate realistic light bouncing into our rendered images is to use global illumination. We will begin this course by learning about the underlying principles of global illumination, and how it relies on photons to calculate the lighting result. From there, we will learn how to adjust photon emission values, incorporating final gather into our global illumination results, saving and re-using global illumination data, override rendered photon results using the render tree, and many other lessons dedicated to explaining the various features and parameters used to control the global illumination result. By the time you complete this course, you will have a much stronger understanding of the underlying principles of global illumination, as well as a better understanding of some the common global illumination pitfalls, limitations, and their solutions.

In the world around us, much of the light that we perceive comes from indirect illumination, or light that bounces off other surfaces to illuminate our surroundings. One of the ways that mental ray allows us to incorporate realistic light bouncing into our rendered images is to use Final Gathering. We will begin this course by learning about the underlying principles of Final Gathering, and how it calculates an indirect lighting result. From there, we will learn how to adjust Final Gather quality settings, how to reduce the amount of Final Gather flickering seen in animations, as well as many other lessons dedicated to explaining the various features and parameters used to control the Final Gather result. By the time you complete this course, you will have a much stronger understanding of the underlying principles of Final Gather, as well as a better understanding of some the common Final Gathering pitfalls, and their solutions.

We'll begin our tutorial by learning how to use global illumination, final gather, and the new Irradiance Particles as well as importons so that you can easily simulate the effects of indirect lighting and quickly render highly realistic scenes. We'll also spend some time going over how you can dramatically increase your rendering speed by saving and re-using indirect illumination data, giving you more time to focus on the creative aspect of the image. We'll also explore how you can use caustics to simulate the light patterns that are created when light passes through refractive surfaces. Then, we'll then take time to explore several specialized mental ray shaders like the architectural materials, subsurface scattering, and ambient occlusion shaders, as well as learn how we can use Render Passes and Render Channels to split our renders into multiple passes for compositing purposes.

This tutorial will take you through every step of the creation process, so we will start by setting up rotoscopes within Softimage to use as reference. From there, we will use a variety of polygon modeling techniques to create low-resolution and high-resolution versions of our asset. Once that stage is complete we will use the Softimage Ultimapper to transfer all of the hi-res detail back to our low-res mesh using normal maps.

Throughout this series of tutorials we use Softimage and mental ray to build our own studio light setup for creating clean, professional-looking renders. We will begin our light setup by placing our direct illumination sources and adjusting light and shadow parameters to achieve our desired result. From there, we will learn how to mimic the effect of studio light diffusers, giving us clean precise reflections on our geometry. Finally, we'll create a reflective studio environment that can enhance our indirect illumination results. Using the techniques discussed here, you will be able to create production-quality lighting that can be used for things like automotive rendering, product visualization, or any number of projects that would call for a studio-lit appearance.

Over this course we will learn how to use states and state machines as well as conditionals to trigger specific reactions and how to switch to new states. We will also cover how to work with multiple states to build interesting particle interactions using beneficial projects.

In this series of lessons, we will utilize Softimage's UV Unfold feature to save a tremendous amount of time on projects requiring complex UV layout. To demonstrate, we will be using UV Unfold to create a complete UV layout on an entire character. We will get started by unfolding the UVs on the head, defining UV cut lines along the neck, and unfolding the UVs into a self-contained UV island. From there, we will see how we can very easily create additional unwrapped UV islands for our character's torso, as well as the hands and feet. With this series of lessons, we will see how the UV Unfold tool can make quick work of complex UV layout tasks, allowing us to quickly move past the UV phase, and dedicate more time to the texturing process.

In this series of lessons, we will take an introductory look at the FX Tree, a very powerful node-based compositing system that can be found right within the Softimage application. We will begin by learning how to access the FX Tree within Softimage, as well as highlighting the tight integration between the Softimage render settings and the FX Tree. We will see how the FX tree can automatically retrieve all of our rendered passes and channels generated by Softimage, and then we will use several of the compositing tools found in the FX tree to re-assemble and significantly alter the look of our final composite. With the FX Tree, we are no longer forced to use external compositing packages; we can perform complex compositing tasks, apply advanced filters and color correction effects, as well as making many other adjustments without ever having to leave the Softimage application.

In this series of lessons we'll learn how to use the Geographical Elevation Mixer in Softimage to create different types of terrain surfaces. We will go over how to build landscapes and terrain illustrations using Softimage. And with our concluding project, you will learn how to render the surface realistically.

In this series of lessons we'll learn how to generate and use object space normal maps in Softimage. We will dive right in and learn how to use the Ultimapper to generate object space normal maps from a hi-res surface. Then we will learn how to code Direct X FX shaders to use these maps in real-time. This is a great project especially for those who have gone through shader pipeline course for Softimage and XNA.

In this series of lessons we will explore workflows for creating a realistic island scene using Softimage and Photoshop. We will begin by setting up our various lights, materials, and shadowing effects within Softimage, giving us a good foundation for adding further details in Photoshop. We will bring our rendered image into Photoshop and add details such as shaded foliage, enhancing shadows and highlights, creating more natural weathering and erosion patterns, atmospheric effects, and much more. Using these techniques, we will be able to use both Softimage and Photoshop to create a finished image much faster, and with more control than if we tried to use only one of these applications.

The mental ray Production Shaders offer us a completely new arsenal for increasing render performance, integrating 3d with live action, easier compositing, and many other advanced rendering features. Through these lessons, we will learn how these production shaders can be used for a variety of purposes, such as adding nearly instantaneous motion blur to our rendered images, seamlessly integrating our 3d art into a live-action plate, achieving more accurate compositing results in an external application, and much more. Using these shaders, we now have access to mental ray features that will allow us to render our images faster, with a much higher level of control, and with much higher quality.