Marshall Belew:In the Material Editor, I noticed that the material I applied does not render a proper thumbnail. The apple object is completely transparent. Is this normal for XNA materials?
"XNA materials" in Softimage are actually real-time shaders. If you are using the Crosswalk pipeline, you need a DirectX effect node connected to the material's real-time port.
You should check your material's render tree. Probably there is no mental ray node connected to the material's surface port. In that case, the shaderball is transparent because Softimage doesn't find a mental ray node to render the shaderball. Don't worry for that, this is not a problem as long as there is a valid DX Fx node connected to the material's real-time port.
Alternatively, if you are exporting FBX files, it seems you will need a simple Phong shader node connected to the surface port, and the DX Fx node is of no effect.
There are a couple of options in Softimage to use the hardware renderer to draw the shaderball. In the Scene Render Options, you can switch the Scene Renderer from mental ray to Hardware Renderer. This is a per scene option. You can also overwrite the renderer used for the shaderballs with Preferences -> Shaderball -> Renderer. I don't use these options in Softimage Mod Tool Pro 7.5; it makes the software too unstable on my machine. But it works fine in Softimage 2010.