Today Softimage announced the imminent release of XSI v6.0. Yey!

Details on the features are at a pretty high level at the moment, so only cover the big stuff but there are loads of bits in there for everyone. Obviously, I have been using this release for a little while now, and am really excited to see it go out of the door soon.

As a little sneak peak, you may have seen the QuickShade rendering video on softimage.com, and noticed they change the shaderball model. In fact this is so easy to do, here is a picture of a (fun) shaderball test in the new Material Manager… now that’s what I call shaderballs!

(Sorry, but this particular shaderball isn’t included as standard, but I like it better than looking at Apples all day.)

(from letskilldave.com)

I am still having fun with this great search engine front page. Basically its a flash site powered by Windows Live Search, that has a presenter that adds her own twist on your search queries. If you are feeling brave, you can ask her some personal questions as well.

Although not designed for a long research period, its great for the odd search.

Here are a few of my favourite searches…

• lord of the rings
• king kong
• What are you reading?
• How old are you?
• Windows Vista
• Superman

It is great to see Microsoft having a bit of fun on the web.

Check it out

Yey! The first tutorial is up, covering how to modify real-time shaders to make use of a colour map’s alpha channel. Hopefully a useful technique for a few of you.