Autodesk® Softimage® software is a high-performance 3D character animation and visual effects application. Softimage enables artists to use intuitive, nondestructive workflows to create stunning character animation and effects. The unique, multithreaded Softimage® GigaCore architecture and innovative tools like ICE (Interactive Creative Environment) and the Autodesk® Face Robot® facial animation toolset extend an Autodesk® Maya® software pipeline. Now you can more quickly and easily create detailed simulated effects, advanced character rigs, and lip-synced facial setups.

Key Strengths of Softimage:

A Powerful Companion to Maya

• An ideal companion to Autodesk® Maya® software, Autodesk® Softimage® software is a high-performance, comprehensive 3D application that enables artists to use intuitive, nondestructive workflows to create stunning character animation and effects. Featuring a unique, multi-threaded GigaCore architecture, and innovative tools like ICE (Interactive Creative Environment) and Face Robot, Softimage extends a Maya pipeline with the ability to more quickly and easily create massively detailed simulated effects, advanced character rigs, and lip-synced facial setups.

Node-Based Interactive Creative Environment (ICE)

• ICE is a powerful platform for creating custom tools, visual effects, and advanced character rigs without the need to script a line of code. Featuring a flexible, intuitive, visual programming interface, ICE is designed to help artists be more efficient and to enable them to more easily explore new creative ideas.

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 that artists can efficiently manipulate extremely complex characters and scenes involving millions of polygons and thousands of animated objects.

Complete Face Robot Toolset

• Softimage includes the complete Face Robot toolset, a professional solution for rigging and animating large numbers of 3D facial expressions quickly and easily. 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.

Nondestructive Workflow

• 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 any part of an asset at any point in the process without destroying your work or forcing you to start from scratch. For example, 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 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 nonlinear animation capabilities: an interactive timeline for animation editing and playback, and a powerful animation mixer for creating complex animations 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. You can transition a walk to a run without slipping feet, or link one character’s animation to another’s in just a few clicks. The mixer gives you high-level control 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, nondestructive 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.