What version of XSI will import a .dsc file

[Leoung O'Young]

We had a request from a client to dredge up an old job going back to 2001

This goes back awhile, does anyone know what version of XSI will import
a .dsc file?

Thanks,
Leoung

[Stephen Blair]

 32-bit Softimage 2010 was the last version that could import DSC or HRC

[Leoung O'Young]

Hi Stephen,

Thanks so much.
I should address you as Sir Softimage.

Leoung

[Matt Lind]

I'm in the middle of doing this too. You'll need Softimage 2010 SP1 or
earlier.

However, note XSI v6.0 and later were full of bugs making SI3D --> XSI not
so reliable. Expect frequent crashing and/or corruption. The latest
version I would trust would be XSI v5.11 if you still have it. Next best
option would be Softimage v7.5, but that comes with a steep drop off in
reliability. Stay away from XSI v6.x and 2010.


Matt






Message: 1
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 14:43:40 -0500
From: "Leoung O'Young" <digi...@digimata.com>
Subject: What version of XSI will import a .dsc file
To: xsi <soft...@listproc.autodesk.com>
Message-ID: <54738A6C...@digimata.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

We had a request from a client to dredge up an old job going back to 2001

This goes back awhile, does anyone know what version of XSI will import
a .dsc file?

Thanks,
Leoung

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[Leoung O'Young]

We tried with 7.01, it seems to be ok but we haven't done extensive testing.
I may have trouble digging up 5.11
Thanks,
Leoung

[Leendert A. Hartog]

Here's a crazy thought (as in completely unfounded in personal experience),
but doesn't Okino's PolyTrans (through "addon", perhaps?) still offer
SI|3D support?
Might be less cumbersome than digging up ancient versions and getting
them to run again...

Greetz
Leendert

--

Leendert A. Hartog AKA Hirazi Blue
Administrator NOT the owner of si-community.com

[Matt Lind]

When Polytrans did have support for Softimage|3D, but I think Okino dropped
support for it years ago. Even if it was available, I think you still
needed to have a copy of Softimage|3D installed to do work as it needed to
source licensing.

Polytrans is currently only showing support for dotXSI. You'd have to go
back into Softimage|3D and export all your scenes to dotXSI to use that
route, and it didn't support all that much as SI3D's dotXSI was one of the
first versions and really primitive. I don't think it's compatible with the
dotXSI that is currently known as crosswalk. If memory serves, the SI3D -->
XSI translator did a better job as I remember trying both.


In my case I need certain features to be handled differently (BSpline
patches, MetaClay, etc.) as well as have some translator bugs fixed as
crashes are not allowing certain scenes to convert. The problem scenes open
just fine in Softimage|3D, but the translator crashes, or Softimage|XSI
crashes for whatever reason when the data is manipulated.

Ideally, I'd like Autodesk to fix the translator bugs and put the translator
back into Softimage so we don't need to hang onto older versions of XSI and
Softimage|3D. I'd prefer to have just the most recent version of Softimage
on one computer and be done with it. I don’t want to be forced to hang onto
an older computer, software, and so on just to support content in my
portfolio. The only reason I have to do this is because all the conversions
I did on the data years ago was recently lost and I have to do it again.

My tentative plan is to write a Softimage|3D plugin to export scenes to text
files. I designed a generic XML file format a number of years ago to make
Softimage scenes and models agnostic of XSI version in use. I was
considering exhuming that project and exporting the Softimage|3D data into
that format so it could be imported into another 3D application provided a
script or plugin is written to read the data. This is all dependent on my
ability to get a Softimage|3D plugin successfully compiled, of course.
Otherwise I'd have to resort to some hackery involving bin2Ascii.exe,
hrcConvert.exe, or figuring out how to parse the binary files myself. The
SAAphire and DKit documentation is rather sparse and not 1:1 with the
provided examples, so that's not an appealing route.


Matt

[Leendert A. Hartog]

Well, you're probable right. I can't find any info on the requirement to
have SI|3d present, but that doesn't sound good. They seem however still
offer it, judging from these webpages:
http://www.okino.com/conv/imp_soft.htm