Autodesk^® Softimage^® 2011 software introduces innovative new rendering, animation and simulation tools that help artists and technical directors (TDs) create more complex, higher-quality characters and effects in less time. With powerful new toolsets with an advanced new shading architecture and editing environment, support for kinematics in ICE (Interactive Creative Environment), and automated lip-syncing in Face Robot^®, Softimage 2011 offers users the flexibility they need to help overcome increasingly tough production challenges and create more convincing content.

• › Rendering Sandbox
• › ICE Kinematics
• › Automatic Face Robot Lip-Syncing
• › 100 New ICE Compounds
• › 100 New mental ray Shaders
• › PhysX 2.83
• › Camera and Render Slate
• › Multi-Camera rendering
• › mental ray 2011
• › UV Unfold Enhancements

Rendering Sandbox

Technical directors, shader writers, and third-party developers can now take advantage of a completely new shader authoring environment that automatically hosts external shaders and renderers without the need to build custom shader UI or any other tools. Shaders and renderers automatically get access to the powerful Softimage rendering features and can be exposed in Softimage via a single .dll.

ICE Kinematics

More easily and rapidly drive the movement and behaviors of characters and scene elements using the flexibility of ICE (Interactive Creative Environment). With ICE kinematics, TDs can more easily create advanced rigging elements: custom inverse kinematics, constraints and dynamic tails. The visual graph-based structure of ICE helps remove trial and error for technical directors, and enables them to more easily examine the construction of other users’ rigs, and to troubleshoot and debug rigs. And, using ICE kinematics helps remove the need for intermediary objects as references, helping reduce complexity and speeding up the rig’s evaluation.

Automatic Face Robot Lip-Syncing

Quickly generate facial animation based on an audio file with new automatic lip-syncing in Face Robot. With this new functionality, the Face Robot toolset delivers a more complete, automated solution for facial rigging and animation.

100 New ICE Compounds

Select from up to 100 new ICE compounds to more easily create a vast range of effects. Compounds can be used directly as presets, or as starting points or learning tools for artists creating their own ICE effects.

100 New mental ray Shaders

Enhance rendering creativity and productivity with up to 100 new mental ray^® shaders: .mi and .mip production shaders, that enable artists to simulate a wide range of materials.

PhysX 2.83

More easily create meshless deformation simulations in ICE with the latest NVIDIA^® PhysX^® rigid body library. With new support for springs and dampers, artists can more easily achieve a wide range of effects such as jelly-like and plastic deformation. The new library also offers accelerated performance, enabling artists to focus on the creative process when creating and refining dynamic simulations. Even faster performance is possible with the optional addition of an NVIDIA^® CUDA^™ enabled GPU.

Camera and Render Slate

Show useful information in the viewport or renders: scene name, camera, render pass, and frame numbers with the new Camera and Render Slate functionality.

Multi-Camera rendering

Save time when rendering passes from multiple cameras. Now each pass can render a sequence for all cameras, eliminating the need to setup a separate pass or scene in order to render from another camera.

mental ray 2011

Take advantage of a more robust production environment, together with an overall increase in stability, and faster renders due to enhanced performance in BSP2, with the new mental ray 2011 renderer.

UV Unfold Enhancements

Create symmetrical results when unfolding, and unwrap local UV islands in the Texture Editor, with enhanced UV Unfold technology.