I've been doing some staring at Softimage XSI, and managed to discover that the FULL version of XSI|Advanced 3.0 is totally free. It is a simple 170MB download, for Win32/Linux, and has some training stuff too. Has anyone tried this out? What's the difference between it and 4.2 Foundation for game production? For an indie studio, this is great. I'm considering 4.2 anyway, but why hasn't this become the staple for indie development?

Could you provide a link? It sounds interesting, but I couldn't find it anywhere myself...

http://www.softimage.com/products/exp/v3/download

There is also a set of tutorials for it too, doesn't look too easy though - but it's complete.

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Original post by zarthrag I've been doing some staring at Softimage XSI, and managed to discover that the FULL version of XSI|Advanced 3.0 is totally free. It is a simple 170MB download, for Win32/Linux, and has some training stuff too. Has anyone tried this out? What's the difference between it and 4.2 Foundation for game production? For an indie studio, this is great. I'm considering 4.2 anyway, but why hasn't this become the staple for indie development?

Heheh, the difference is, that that version is NOT a standalone version. It is severely hampered, it can, IIRC (I uninstalled it a while back) only export to a few different HL2 compativle formats, you can't render large pics, the End-User license is restricting, etc. Anyway, for 400 or so bucks, you can get the foundation anyway, so why bother downloading this, unless you're just trying out software to see what works best for you?