Autodesk Softimage 2012

Autodesk Softimage software is a high-performance 3D character animation and visual effects application. Intuitive, nondestructive workflows and the innovative ICE (Interactive Creative Environment) and Autodesk® Face Robot® facial animation toolsets extend Autodesk® Maya® or Autodesk® 3ds Max® software pipelines. With new creative tools, enhanced interoperability with Autodesk® Entertainment Creation Suite Premium products, and support for the latest technology trends, Autodesk Softimage enables you to meet the evolving challenges in 3D game development and post-production.

Features:

ICE Modeling
Leverage the power and flexibility of ICE to create geometry based on a set of rules, conditions, and parameters. New ICE procedural modeling offers topology operation creation, particle meshing, custom primitives, and geometry fracturing. UV attributes and certain other data are preserved during edits, helping to eliminate the need for retexturing as changes are made. A single ICE graph can handle interactive edits to huge data sets, such as forests and cities, so you can more easily create and manage extremely high levels of detail.
   
Enhanced Everyday Workflows
Autodesk Softimage 2012 software includes workflow updates and improvements to boost productivity and ease of use. The Texture Editor, Explorer, Schematic View, Scene Layer Manager, Render Tree, Bone Primitive, Reference Models, and Weight Editor have all received attention. For example, Layer Groups have been added to the Explorer and retain their visibility settings when their parent layer is toggled, making it easier to manage complex scenes.
   
Syflex on ICE
Now you can use the power of ICE to achieve greater control and flexibility over Syflex cloth simulations. Take advantage of the flexible, node-based workflow of ICE to create and edit highly realistic cloth effects faster and more easily.
   
Lagoa Multiphysics
Plastic, liquid, soft-body, cloth, and foam-like effects are achievable with new compounds that use the Lagoa Multiphysics framework developed by Lagoa Technologies. With Lagoa, you can more easily create incompressible fluids, as well as inelastic, elastic, and plastic deformations.

Stereoscopic Support
Take advantage of the current trend for 3D films with new tools for the creation of stereoscopic 3D renderings. The tools feature an in-viewport stereoscopic viewer offering a range of display modes and a stereoscopic camera rig.
   
Single-step Suites Interoperability
More easily take advantage of the focused toolsets in the Autodesk® Entertainment Creation Suites Premium, with new single-step interoperability between Softimage and Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, and Autodesk® Mudbox™ software. Export Softimage scene elements to Mudbox to intuitively add organic sculpted and painted details. Then, update the scene in Softimage in one simple step. Use the Softimage ICE particle system in your Maya or 3ds Max scene.

Creativity Decoded.

Autodesk Softimage 2012 software delivers innovative new creative toolsets, enhanced interoperability, and tools that embrace emerging technology trends.

Autodesk® Softimage® software is a high-performance 3D application that enables you to use intuitive, non-destructive workflows to help create stunning character animation and effects. With differentiated tools for facial animation, the powerful Interactive Creative Environment (ICE), enhanced interoperability with Autodesk® Entertainment Creation Suite Premium products; and new tools that embrace the latest technology trends, Softimage 2012 helps bring an innovative edge to your TV, game, or film pipeline.

The Power of ICE – Now Extended
Building on the power and flexibility of ICE, Softimage 2012 introduces a new procedural modeling paradigm. You can now create geometry based on a set of rules, conditions, and parameters; a single ICE graph can handle interactive edits to huge data sets: forests and cities—so you can more easily create and manage the extremely high levels of detail required by today’s productions. Also, Softimage 2012 adds integrated support for Syflex cloth and Lagoa Multiphysics simulations, so you can use the intuitive ICE interface to create and edit highly realistic cloth, plastic, liquid, soft-body, and foam-like effects. A new ICE FX builder, compounds, preset FX, shaders, and model library provide easier access to a wide range of effects and rendered looks.

Enhanced Interoperability, Easier Integration
Taking advantage of the focused toolsets in the Autodesk® Entertainment Creation Suites Premium is now easier, thanks to new single-step interoperability workflows between Softimage 2012 and Autodesk® Maya® 2012, Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2012, and Autodesk® Mudbox™ 2012 software, together with a consistent f-curve editor. With an extended software development kit (SDK), and added support for the Maya 2012 nCache format and Autodesk® FBX® 2012 asset exchange format, Softimage 2012 is more easily integrated into production pipelines.

New Technology Embraced, Everyday Workflows Accelerated
Softimage 2012 embraces emerging technology to help you meet evolving challenges of modern productions, and revisits existing tools to help make everyday workflows more productive. For example, new tools for the creation of stereoscopic renderings help you take advantage of the current trend for 3D films; moreover, added support for vector displacement maps means you can render complex high-resolution details with appendages, folds, undercuts, and bulges on low-resolution geometry. At the same time, new relaxing and pinning options help you save time and effort when creating and editing UVs, while overall productivity and ease of use are boosted thanks to a wide range of enhancements across the board.

Key New Features in Autodesk Softimage 2012

ICE Modeling
Leverage the power and flexibility of ICE to help create highly detailed geometry based on a set of rules, conditions, and parameters. New ICE procedural modeling facilitates topology operation creation, particle meshing, custom primitives, and geometry fracturing.

Enhanced Everyday Workflows
Overall productivity and ease of use are boosted in Softimage 2012. Adding up to a noticeably improved user experience, the Texture Editor, Explorer, Schematic View, Scene Layer Manager, Render Tree, Bone Primitive, Reference Models, and Weight Editor have all received attention.

UV Unfolding
Save time and effort with new UV relaxing and pinning options, making it easier to conform to an existing image or to create a regular sized set of UVs.

Syflex on ICE
Now you can use the power of ICE to achieve greater control and flexibility over Syflex cloth simulations. Taking advantage of the flexible node-based workflow of ICE, you can create and edit highly-realistic cloth effects faster and more easily.

Lagoa Multiphysics
Plastic, liquid, soft-body, cloth, and foam-like effects are achievable, with new compounds that use the Lagoa Multiphysics framework developed by Lagoa Technologies. With Lagoa, you can more easily create incompressible fluids, as well as inelastic, elastic, and plastic deformations.

ICE FX Builder
Create and modify sophisticated effects more quickly and easily, with the help of the new ICE FX Builder. A module menu toolbar provides a springboard into ICE for common workflows: for example, particle emission type can be set from a menu option, and the effect modified as required with just a few mouse-clicks.

Stereoscopic Support
Take advantage of the current trend for 3D films, with new tools for the creation of stereoscopic renderings. The tools feature an in-viewport stereoscopic viewer offering a range of display modes, and a stereoscopic camera rig.

ICE Subframe Sampling
Calculate collisions more accurately in ICE simulations, especially for fast moving and deforming objects, with new support for subframe sampling on a per-object or per-point cloud basis.

Vector Displacement Map Support
With new support for Vector Displacement Maps in Softimage, you can use mental ray® rendering technology to render complex high-resolution details created in Autodesk® Mudbox™ 2012 software or certain other applications on low-resolution geometry.

High-Performance Compositing
The Softimage® Composite high-performance, highdynamic range (HDR) compositing toolsets offers keying, tracking, color correction, raster and vector paint, rotoscoping, warping, advanced filters, a full 3D compositing environment, and tools that help support stereoscopic productions.

Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites Premium 2012
The Autodesk® Entertainment Creation Suite Premium 2012 offers a range of powerful, creative toolsets at a significant cost saving*. Starting with a choice of either Maya or 3ds Max, the Premium Suite includes Autodesk® MotionBuilder® real-time character animation software, Mudbox digital sculpting and 3D painting software, and Softimage software. Learn more at www.autodesk.com/entertainment-creation-suites.

Top Reasons to Buy Autodesk Softimage

Node-Based Interactive Creative Environment (ICE)
ICE is a powerful platform for creating and sharing custom tools, dynamic effects, advanced character rigs, and procedural models without the need to script a line of code. The flexible, intuitive, visual programming interface helps artists to work more efficiently and easily explore new creative ideas, while a high-performance parallel processing engine helps increase interactivity and boost productivity. Artists can modify or extend effects using a standard editing workflow with the ICE FX Builder. ICE effects can be exported to Autodesk® Maya® software or Autodesk® 3ds Max® software.

GigaCore High-Performance 3D Engine
Softimage GigaCore is a next-generation 3D engine that powers the Softimage creative application. Capable of rendering objects with billions of sub-division surface polygons, GigaCore is highly multi-threaded and optimized to take advantage of the latest 64-bit, multi-core CPUs so artists can more efficiently manipulate extremely complex characters and scenes involving millions of polygons and thousands of animated objects.

Complete Facial Animation Toolset
Softimage includes the Autodesk® Face Robot® toolset, a professional solution for quickly and easily rigging and animating large numbers of 3D facial expressions. Face Robot enables games and visual effects studios to create life-like facial animation at incredible speeds, and features automatic lip-syncing for the generation of facial animation from an audio file. Fully-solved Face Robot heads can be exported to Maya for greater flexibility when creating believable characters. Using Face Robot, animators are free to concentrate on emotion, expression, and delivering unforgettable performances.

Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites Integrated Workflows
Available as part of the Autodesk® Entertainment Creation Suites Premium alongside either Maya or 3ds Max, together with Autodesk® MotionBuilder® software and Autodesk® Mudbox™ software, Softimage takes advantage of integrated workflows to extend your pipeline’s capabilities. Export Softimage scene elements to Mudbox to intuitively add organic sculpted and painted details, and then update the scene in Softimage in one simple step. Import fully-rigged Face Robot meshes into Maya. And use the power of the Softimage ICE particle system in your Maya or 3ds Max scene with just a few clicks. 3D geometry, animation, and map data can also be exchanged with Suites products and certain third-party applications via the Autodesk® FBX® and Autodesk® Crosswalk technologies. Learn more about the Entertainment Creation Suites Premium at autodesk.com/entertainment-creation-suites.

Nondestructive Workflows
Creativity is about experimentation: the ability to try things out, change them, and easily discard the things that do not work. Softimage offers artists just that, with an end-to-end nondestructive workflow that enables you to make changes to parts of an asset at any point in the process without destroying your work or forcing you to start from scratch. You can make modeling, texturing, and even rigging changes to rigged and animated characters without having to re-construct bones, bone weights or shape animation. You can more easily retarget animations to other rigs and transfer complex surface attributes from one character to another. An integrated paint and compositing engine further extends the non-destructive workflow to texturing and final image composition.

Industry-Leading Nonlinear Animation and Mixing
Softimage offers extensive non-linear animation capabilities: an interactive timeline for animation editing and playback, and a powerful animation mixer to help create complex animations more quickly and easily. You can mix and layer animation clips, composite clips, constraints, and expressions to shapes and textures, as well as create libraries of animations. The mixer provides high-level control together with low-level precision for increased quality and productivity.

Production-Proven Solution
Increased competition and tighter deadlines, combined with higher audience expectations for quality, mean that many jobs require artists to produce more creative content in less time than ever before. Softimage helps maximize productivity through advanced creative tools, efficient scene management tools, non-destructive workflows, and support for collaborative workflows. Repetitive tasks can also be automated through Python® scripting language. As a result, Softimage is one of the entertainment industry’s leading 3D production tools. It has been used extensively by award-winning film, game development, and broadcast production facilities.

Extensibility
Softimage is a comprehensive 3D solution. For companies wishing to integrate it with their existing pipelines, or to add differentiated new feature development on top, the software offers avenues for customization: Python scripting, support for .NET compliant languages, the Tools Development Environment – to help create and manage custom tools – and an extensive, well-documented C++ application processing interface (API).

Autodesk Subscription and Support
For an affordable annual fee that helps you plan your budget ahead, Autodesk® Subscription with Gold Support for Softimage entitles you to all new releases and advantage packs offered during the Subscription period and provides access to knowledgeable support experts via telephone or web. In addition, Subscription members are entitled to use certain previous versions of Softimage. Learn more at autodesk.com/subscription.

System Requirements:

For 32-Bit Autodesk Softimage 2012

• Microsoft® Windows® 7 Professional, Microsoft® Windows Vista® Business (SP2), or Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional (SP3) operating system
• Intel® Pentium® D processor workstation
• Certified hardware-accelerated OpenGL® 1.5 (or higher) professional graphics card with latest graphics driver available from vendor
• DirectX® 9.0c application programming interface or higher (recommended for support of the advanced features of DirectX® 9 application programming interface)
• 1 GB free hard drive space. Setup requires additional temporary disk space for the system’s temporary folder when decompressing files during installation.
• TCP/IP service protocol installed on both client and server computers
• 2 GB of RAM
• 1,280 x 1,024 screen resolution recommended
• Three-button mouse
• A web browser to view HTML documentation
• Microsoft® Internet Explorer® internet browser 5.5 or higher
• Network adaptor with Internet connection for licensing (non-Internet connected licensing is also supported)

For 64-Bit Autodesk Softimage 2012

• Microsoft Windows 7 Professional, Microsoft Windows Vista Business x64 (SP2), Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 (SP2), or Fedora™ Core 14 operating system
• Intel Pentium D processor
• Certified hardware-accelerated OpenGL 1.5 (or higher) professional graphics card with latest graphics driver available on vendor's site
• DirectX 9.0c and higher (recommended for support of the advanced features of DirectX 9 application programming interface)
• 1 GB free hard drive space. Setup requires additional temporary disk space for the system’s temporary folder when decompressing files during installation.
• TCP/IP service protocol installed on both client and server computers
• 4 GB of RAM
• 1,280 x 1,024 screen resolution recommended
• Three-button mouse
• A web browser to view HTML documentation
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher
• Network adaptor with Internet connection for licensing (non-Internet connected licensing is also supported)
• DVD-ROM drive