Softimage problems

Xoliul

It's the second time I'm trying to give Softimage a go. My first try ended in the trial refusing to start. That was before the Autodesk takeover, so I just gave it another go with an official Softimage 2010 CD from work, with an educational license.
Alas, things don't seem to have improved much. First off it doesn't want to install in Program Files because there's a space in the path (seriously? It's 2010 for christ's sake, the last time I had an installer complain about that was on Windows 98 ). Then it just hung with a full installation progress bar, while "configuring my new software installation". It's still doing that at this moment.

This program is supposed to be really good, but in 2 attempts I haven't even been able to do as much as open it... Anybody have any hints on how I should do this ?

ZacD

email autodesk or call their customer support, I've never had anything like this happen to me.

cryrid

What OS are you using? I've had it running on XP, Vista, and currently W7. Never had it complain about spaces in the file name (default installation settings used though).

Xoliul

I guess I'll contact customer support then, it's ridiculous I have to do this for the installation..
And it's Just Windows 7, clean installation from a year ago with minimal junk on it, never had any problems so far.

r_fletch_r

The SI support guys are great, When i was installing i had a few glitches with the license and they sorted it pretty much instantly. Im pretty sure they kept them on when AD took over. Definately worth contacting.

cryrid

They did, at least some of them (I'd usually go straight to Stephen Blair whenever I could).
Ridiculous perhaps, but that's the world of computers for ya. Sometimes the process is smooth sailing, other times there's rare glitches (one of my friends, no matter what path she tried to install to, kept getting an error simply due to having a specific kind of bddvdrw drive installed - it's device name was screwing with the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable installation. It installed fine once the device was physically unplugged)

thomasp

i think softimage has been refusing to install to a path containing spaces - which just happens to be the (english language) windows system default - since before it became XSI. at least they seem to FAIL consistently.

it's been a while for me but you might be in for some more treats like their user-folder structure and own file browser, can't remember details but it all felt tacked on as opposed to made to cooperate well with windows/explorer. which is funny because XSI supposedly was aimed from the get go specifically for the windows platform (the previous softimage product was all unix-centric and seriously clunky on windows).

i think you'll find the program to be a bit of an odd one in the usability department, too. not necessarily bad though.

cryrid

i think softimage has been refusing to install to a path containing spaces - which just happens to be the (english language) windows system default - since before it became XSI. at least they seem to FAIL consistently.

The 90 or so machines I had to install it on over the last 3 years must all be anomalies for accepting the default path without protest :S

raul

at my old job, we always installed xsi in a different drive. Tho, what i still have issues is installing python on my new 64 bit machine at home! Other than that, xsi never really barked.

Dude! im excited to see you use xsi. Does this mean, eventually we get a cool real time shader for it? By the way, if youve got questions about it, i may have answers!

cryrid

Does this mean, eventually we get a cool real time shader for it?

The earlier versions of his shader work in it
Obviously its not as fancy compared to the sweetness that the newer versions offer, but its still a great shader to load in.

Xoliul

Yeah the idea is to port my shader to it, that's the main reason I wanna try it. Maya was a breeze to port it to, even though the interface isn't great, so the next step would be to support all of the big three applications.

I'm just gonna try and run the installer again, maybe I'm more lucky this time. I'm reluctant to call customer support because i'm not in the US...

EDIT: OK it worked like right away this time, wtf. I did do a little trick; made a shortcut to the setup.exe for the win64 version, and then set that setup to XP SP3 compatibility and "run as admin" mode. That might've been the fix. I think it's because this Autodesk education suite box I have, was created just slightly before Win 7 was released, resulting in some slight imcompatibility.

Xoliul

thomasp wrote: »

it's been a while for me but you might be in for some more treats like their user-folder structure and own file browser, can't remember details but it all felt tacked on as opposed to made to cooperate well with windows/explorer. which is funny because XSI supposedly was aimed from the get go specifically for the windows platform (the previous softimage product was all unix-centric and seriously clunky on windows).

i think you'll find the program to be a bit of an odd one in the usability department, too. not necessarily bad though.

Wow you are right, I had a hard time even figuring out how to browse to the directory on my HD that contains the FX files... Seriously weird explorer interface.

edit: anybody mind explaining the procedure to load shaders ? It's not really working out for me.

Ark

Check this little tut for loading the shaders: http://cryrid.com/art/?p=44

cryrid

I really ought to update that thing with a shader that doesn't require extra steps >.<

Open Windows Explorer, find the shader you want, click and drag it onto the model. Open the material in the render tree (shortcut key 7) and plug in the images/coordinates/tangents/binormals you want. Also be sure to Switch the viewport mode to Realtime Directx or RealtimeOGL depending on what kind of shader you're using.


Regarding the custom browser, on the plus side it can be pretty fast once you set up paths and favorite directories.