SoftImage

CS 348C - Modeling in Computer Graphics
Fall quarter, 1995
Coordinator: Apostolos Lerios

SoftImage is a computer graphics software package, distributed by Microsoft corporation. It contains a large collection of executables, from a production quality modeling and animation system, to a ray tracer, a particle system simulator, and standalone utilities for image compositing, format conversions, and much more. Many of these tools come in handy when the students generate renderings for their project presentations. For this reason, students are strongly encouraged to browse the printed SoftImage manuals.

Documentation

The complete set of printed SoftImage manuals is available from the course coordinator for very short-term loans.
The Reference 1 and Reference 2 binders of the User's Guide to SoftImage 3D (part of the printed documentation) are available at the teaching laboratory in Sweet Hall, in a box labeled CS 348C. A copy of the SoftImage 3D tutorial, with individual lessons separately bound, is also available at the same location.
Microsoft maintains on-line information on SoftImage, although very little documentation on the package itself is available on the WWW.

Account setup

This section describes the procedure that the students should follow in order to customize their accounts for use with the SoftImage package. The following procedure applies verbatim only to the SoftImage installation at the teaching laboratory in Sweet Hall. For the installation at the computer graphics laboratory in CIS, the customization procedure is similar but not identical; the primary differences are that

in CIS, the SoftImage directory is /usr/common/licensed/softimage/, and
some demo files may be present only in one of the two installations.

The customization procedure for the teaching laboratory has as follows:

Log on to one of the Silicon Graphics Indigo workstations. You have to log on to the console itself - the steps that follow will fail if you attempt to customize your account via remote login.
Execute the following command in your home directory:
```
source /usr/class/cs348c/software/softimage/.softimage
```
This command defines or augments some environment variables which the SoftImage package uses; it also defines a few convenient aliases.
Add the command above to your .cshrc file. This will save you some typing every time you log in.
Type soft and hit Return; ignore the error messages that appear on your terminal window. This will start up SoftImage 3D.
When the copyright screen appears, press any mouse button. Wait for a few seconds and until a new screen appears, containing four grids in the center and two columns of buttons on either edge of the screen.
A warning dialogue box should show up. Press the "Create" button.
A new dialogue box should appear. Type soft in the Name field and press the "Create" button. This will create a file named DatabaseDir.rsrc in your home directory, as well as a SoftImage database named soft. A SoftImage database is a collection of directories in which models of 3D scenes are stored, along with their textures, animation data, and much more.
When a new warning dialogue box appears, press the "OK" button.
Press the "Exit" button of the database creation dialog box.
Press the "Exit" button at the bottom left corner of the screen.
When a new warning dialogue box appears, press the "OK" button.

Account cleanup

In order to reverse the installation procedure, and reclaim the precious disk space used by SoftImage, you need to

remove the line

source /usr/class/cs348c/software/softimage/.softimage

from your .cshrc file,

remove the file DatabaseDir.rsrc from your home directory, and finally
remove the SoftImage database. To this end, execute the following command in your home directory:
```
rm -fr soft
```

Components of the SoftImage package

All components of the SoftImage package are available via a licensing protocol. This protocol is automatically executed every time a SoftImage executable is invoked, and hence is, usually, transparent to the user. However, since Stanford has only 8 licenses, it is quite possible that invoking a SoftImage executable will only produce an error. In this case, just try invoking the executable again at a later time, hoping that a license will have been freed up by another user.

All components of the SoftImage package execute only on Silicon Graphics workstations. Also, most of them require the user to be logged on the workstation's console; if this is not the case, some executables will simply exit without reporting any errors.

SoftImage 3D

SoftImage 3D is an integrated system that allows the user to access most of the features of the SoftImage package, including 3D modeling, animation, and rendering. To enter SoftImage 3D, just type soft in the command-line, and press any mouse button when the copyright screen appears.

Mental Ray

Mental Ray is a powerful ray tracer, incorporating features such as the following:

It renders many geometric primitives, including NURBS.
It allows complex camera specifications, including motion blur and lens effects.
It handles area light sources.
It provides handles for user-defined shaders.
It incorporates several optimizations for reducing rendering time.
It uses a very simple, yet powerful, scene definition language.

While Mental Ray is capable of distributed (parallel) rendering, this feature is not activated on the Stanford installations.

To execute Mental Ray, just type ray.irix5 in the command-line.

Particle

Particle is a particle system simulator. It offers a friendly user interface to defining and rendering particle systems. To execute Particle, just type particle in the command-line.

Several examples of particle systems are available in a demo SoftImage database. In order to make this database visible to the particle executable, modify the file DatabaseDir.rsrc in your home directory by adding the two lines below:

DATABASE particle
PATH /usr/class/cs348c/software/softimage/Particle/EXAMPLES

Standalone utilities

A large collection of executables provides some of the functionality of SoftImage 3D from the command-line. Here is a sample of some standalone utilities:

blur blurs an image. A host of other image processing utilities are also available, such as contour for contour extraction, contrast for contrast alteration, effect for image rotation and flipping, noise for noise addition, etc.
composite allows the user to digitally compose images.
display shows the contents of an image file on the screen, while flipbook displays image sequences as animations.
soft2sgi and sgi2soft convert images between the SoftImage (pic) format and the Silicon Graphics (rgb) format. Similar utilities are available for a host of other image formats, including PostScript.
soft2dxf and dxf2soft convert scenes between the SoftImage format and the DXF (Drawing Interchange File) format. A similar pair of utilities is available for the IGES (Initial Graphics Exchange Specification) format.

Other

The SoftImage package also contains a few other modules, such as Minerva and Ray Rebels, which are not available on the Stanford installations. However, if student projects require the use of these modules, the coordinator will install them upon demand.

There is also a SoftImage newsgroup for French speakers, in case you are interested.

Last update: 13 December 1995 by Apostolos "Toli" Lerios

tolis@cs.stanford.edu