[shushens]

As an XSI lover, I am very confused now. Not sure whether this is a good news or bad news. Softimage is known for meticulous development and beta testing, which is exactly Autodesk's opposite. Max and Maya are terribly buggy. They keep releasing service packs and productivity packs and creativity extensions and still its stability is nowhere close to XSI's. It is true that XSI was not very good integrationwise and not many rendering engines supported it and it had other shortcomings, but Autodesk could never implement Mental Ray nearly as efficiently as XSI. Rendering multiple passes in XSI is child's play, whereas they are releasing video courses on rendering passes/layers in Maya/Max and still it is unclear to many. Last but not least, XSI has easiest integration with ZBrush and because of tools like ultimapper, one does not even need Zmapper or stuff like that any more. The map generation can be done in XSI itself, which is much more convenient because then the user does not have to worry about how to make the map work with the destination 3D app. XSI is cheaper, faster, more robust, and with GigapolygonCoreII, it can handle a truly insane amount of geometry provided the resources are right. With all this now in the hands of Autodesk, I cannot say I feel very safe.

If Autodesk now starts making XSI 2009, 2010, 2011, and so on... with terribly buggy incomplete releases, it will truly be a sad thing for XSI users :(