First and foremost, all my apologies for the long silence. We have been extremely busy working on the new version of XSI and the past few months have been very very busy. I am currently catching up on issues, but here are the top 3 we are currently looking at: 

• Modtool and Live community licensing
• Export issues with animation clips and IK
• Update to documentation

Stay tuned, hopefully we will be able to answer shortly.

 

Best regards.

 

Thanks for the update!  I'm eagerly watching this thread!

I really hope the licensing lets us publish to LIVE Arcade Community once it's live, despite being technically "commercial". I really like XSI and had thought I'd eventually invest in the cheapest "Foundation" edition one day.  BUT I see "Foundation" is apparently being phased out. The next edition up is prohibitively expensive for the likes of me I'm afraid.

I wounder how you plan to fix the IK and animation complexities.

One of the obvious things to fix is the transform freezing that everyone forgets to do or doesn't know they should do that then ends up showing up as a problem when moving over to xna.

I think a cool idea for IK would be to script some of the processes shown in the tutorial that used constrained deformers with rigs built on top of them. You could animate with different rigs on the same deformers that are keyframed from their own character keyset apart from the rigs. The rigs would be scripted to first align themselves to the deformers they are assigned to and then to constrain the deformers to them. By picking interchangable rig templates that can be muted or interchange freely on top of the deformers-- the animators could easily pick the right rig for the right situation on the same character. This would pull away from the practice that goes into creating heavily complex rigs that are designed to do everything. The proof of practice that goes with creating a complex rig just seems like it puts a lot of indie developers at odds with it.

The main issue is that plotting animation is the center piece of the export pipeline. Animation plotting allows the exporter to sample animation as simple SRT value from complex rigs or constructs that are built with IK, expressions, constraints and custom operators. Currently it works perfectly for the animation that is current in the timeline, but it doesn't work on animation clips. This is exactly what we are currently working on. By solving this problem, you will be able to simplify your rigs and weight directly to IK chains and bones instead of constraining to a shadow deformer rig. You should also be able to simply keyframe IK effectors instead of using complete character key set dramatically reducing the number of keys you have to work with.

Hope that's helpful.