Witch Doctor

[Delowyn]

I modeled and rendered the Witch Doctor character in Softimage XSI. I then used Photoshop to build the background and composite the rendered model.
http://diablo.incgamers.com/gallery/data/550/medium/WD-1920.jpg (http://diablo.incgamers.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=2084&size=big&cat=550)

Some other fan art of mine:
Guild Wars
http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/4297/onissavx8.th.jpg (http://img156.imageshack.us/my.php?image=onissavx8.jpg)
http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/3231/finalcompositeyx7.th.jpg (http://img183.imageshack.us/my.php?image=finalcompositeyx7.jpg)

[AkumaSlayer]

The WD model looks nice. Did you use materials or textures?

The first GW one would have to be pre-searing, with a warrior fighting some ebon tree spiders. :p The second one isn't noticeably GW-ish to me, but it still looks fantastic.

I've never heard of Softimage XSI before, is it hard to learn?

[Leord]

Wow, didn't realize this was a resurrection of an old thread. Really amazing job man!

[Delowyn]

@AkumaSlayer:
In XSI, textures and other shaders make up a Material, so techinically both "materials" and "textures" were used. XSI wasn't too difficult to learn. You may not have heard of XSI before, but no doubt you've seen movies and played video games that used it extensively during production. Check out Softimage (http://www.softimage.com/). The main page lists some of their latest customer projects. Metal Gear Solid 4, Halo Wars, Ninja Gaiden 2, Incredible Hulk movie to name a few. If you're really interested, they have a demo version of the software you can take for a spin.

[Butch Audacity]

What operating system and computer did you use to run XSI?

[AkumaSlayer]

According to that site it's the most advanced 3D modelling program available.. the renders do look pretty impressive, I don't think I could achieve the same thing in 3dsMax.

[Delowyn]

@Butch Audacity
I use Vista on a Q9550 CPU, 4GB RAM. I built it a month ago.

@AkumaSlayer
That's mostly marketing hype, but XSI is quite advanced in what it can do. It can do more than what I'll ever be capable of producing with it. Autodesk, who produces your 3dsMax, recently acquired Softimage XSI. Autodesk now owns Maya, 3dsMax, and XSI, arguably the 3 top 3D effects packages on the market other than Houdini.

[AkumaSlayer]

According to this (http://www.3drender.com/jobs/proapps.htm) website I think Maya is still leading the market. Not sure if that's accurate or not though..

I wonder if Autodesk will continue producing Maya/Softimage XSI/3dsMax in the future? It would be a lot of work to continue all of them, and they're all similar products. So they could merge them into a new package.... it would save on production costs, but it might not sell as well as the three separate programs. :\

[Delowyn]

Ya, tossing or merging packages would also severely alienate current customers of those products who already have them deeply integrated in their production pipeline. From what I've read, they are keeping all 3 alive. They acquired Maya long ago, and it's still around. Like you said, it's also the current leader of them all. Although they own these 3, they are all developed by separate companies, so it's not a development burden at all. It's also interesting because these programs still compete with each other as much now, under Autodesk's umbrella, as they did when they were independent companies competing with each other.