Jeremy Birn's Softimage vs. Alias comparison

Home | Info | March 98 update

SOFTIMAGE vs. ALIAS

by Jeremy Birn

Jeremy Birn uses both Softimage 3D and Alias Power Animator in production work.

This article is based on a comparison of Softimage 3D Extreme version 3.7 for the SGI and Alias Power Animator version 8 .0 with Advanced Animation. As we move through the production process, from building models, to animating, to rendering, there are advantages and disadvantages to each product.

MODELLING:

Softimage gives you most of the tools you'll need to model a character or an environment. It has a few "missing links" in its modelling system when it comes to fitting together different parts of a character seamlessly, or more advanced modelling of industrial products, but it has basically full polygonal modelling, modelling with b-spline patches, metaballs, and a limited set of trimmed NURBS tools. It has yet to implement a number of more advanced NURBS functions, such as fillets, birails, intersect>trim, NURBS booleans, etc.

Alias has long held a reputation as the top modelling system, with a very mature and complete toolset for trimmed NURBS modelling, making it well suited for modelling creatures and characters, industrial design, architecture, and many other applications. Many companies use alias just for its modelling capabilities, then export the models to animate in other software. Its polygon modelling functions are slightly more limited than its NURBS, but still competitive. It only supports metaballs through a very limited plug-in.

ANIMATION:

Softimage's speed and interactivity, and ease-of-use in areas like its animation curve editor, put it far ahead of Alias in the opinion of most character animators. Many companies use Softimage just for its animation capabilities, even if they model and render in other software. Softimage has a powerful range of inverse kinematics, many deformation tools for interactively reshaping your models, many plug-in motion effects, and shape animation for facial animation or other 3D morphing. Animation in Softimage can be created and edited without struggling against the software, even with complex scenes and high-polygon models that would slow Alias to a crawl.

Alias has an extremely complete feature-set, but can be painfully slow for character animation on a ordinary mid-range SGI. Simply scrubbing back and forth through an animation can become difficult or impossible when you have a character with a complex skeleton and geometry. Alias lacks equivalents of some of Softimage's most powerful deformation tools, such as lattice deformation and deformation on a surface. Alias's Warp lights add a useful new type of deformation that is fairly fast and interactive to use, and has no exact duplicate in Softimage. A notable exception to Alias's sluggishness is its soundsync module, which gives a fast, interactive system for facial and lipsynch animation, outperforming anything now possible in Softimage for talking characters.

RENDERING:

Softimage is in the middle of a difficult transition between an old and a new renderer. The old Softimage renderer is a fast raytracer, but lacks features that are now expected even in many lower-priced systems, like lens-flares, displacement mapping, particles, and atmosphere, and is somewhat quirky and bug-ridden in areas like motion blur, depth of field, and field rendering.

Softimage's newer Mental Ray renderer is very promising and powerful, and opened to plug-in shaders in a way that could make it comparable to Renderman. However, many features are still too slow to use in some productions. At this version, it is not completely integrated into the program, and yet is greatly handicapped by the old user interface for texturing and lighting, so much that a user can't layer multiple 3D textures onto a model, can't rotate a UV map applied to a surface, and can't project a map seamlessly onto multiple components at once. With faster rendering, tighter integration into the animation system, and a new interface for texturing and lighting controls in Softimage, Mental Ray could become a more useful high-end tool in the future.

Alias's texturing and lighting are superb and full-featured, making it very desirable for advanced animation and rendering projects. It has two renderers, a raycaster and a raytracer. The raytracer doesn't support motion-blur, which limits its usefulness in production. The raycaster is a very powerful and controllable renderer, and the combination of high-quality texture, lighting, and shading, atmospheric, volumetric and optical effects, have helped its users continue to produce an amazing body of creative work. It seems as though every time I use this renderer, I discover more of its depth and power. The speed is generally faster than Softimage's mental ray, but not quite as fast as the old Softimage renderer.

PARTICLES:

Softimage doesn't yet support particles in either renderer. A limited utility called Particle ships with Softimage. It looks like a junior version of Wavefront's Dynamation, but lacks the sophistication of control over particle behavior. The particles it renders have a limited range of appearances, and must be rendered within the particle utility and composited over your 3D renderings, so that they will not cast shadows into the scene, or be illuminated by the lighting in the scene, or be influenced by texture maps in the scene. I have rarely heard of Softimage's particles being used in high-end professional work, and am glad to hear that Softimage will try to replace this utility with built-in particles at some point in the future. Particle motion can be exported and applied through a plug-in to objects within Softimage, making this potentially useful as an alternate dynamic simulation engine for models within the program.

Alias's particles make Alias a must-have for any visual effects business. A unique range of rendering possibilities and tight integration with alias's texture and lighting system gives this system an amazing range of capabilities, from the most subtle touch in a scene to dramatic visual effects. True volumetric particles help build smoke, atmospheric effects, sparks, and fire. Blobby particles work well for fluid and water effects, appearing similar to little metaballs. Convincing particle-based hair and fur can be emitted from surfaces, that cast shadows onto objects, responds to forces like wind and character motion, and can be controlled by texture maps for its location, coloration, thickness and length, and other attributes, although more advanced effects like hair can require a great deal of rendering time. Some companies have bought Alias for its particle rendering abilities alone, and have not been disappointed with their investment.

PLUG-INS AND OPENED ARCHITECTURE:

Softimage ships with many plug-in effects for modelling and animation, and more are available for free download on-line, and sold commercially by other companies. Some Softimage plug-ins, such as Shrinkwrap, provide useful tools that have no equivalent in Alias. The Mental Ray renderer is very open to plug-in shaders, providing another level of opened architecture, and several companies offer additional Mental Ray shader libraries. Softimage's availability on Windows NT is already greatly expanding its total number of seats, making it a larger market for 4th party development than it was as a UNIX-only program.

Alias has started supporting plug-ins more recently than Softimage, and has fewer of them. Even though Alias is primarily a NURBS-based program, most of the plug-ins available are for polygonal modelling. Alias's renderer technically supports plug-in custom shaders, but they are not addressable within the alias user interface, so this is a rarely used and unsupported option.

EASE OF USE:

Softimage is generally simpler and easier to get started with. Alias is a deeper, more complex program, with several times as many dialog boxes, parameters, and controls. Once you have learned both these systems, sometimes Softimage becomes very challenging when you run into limits of its functionality, and you might find some more advanced functions much easier to achieve successfully in Alias. Generally Alias is designed as more of a high-end system, with Softimage optimizing more factors for general use, including "hard-coding" many parameters that Alias allows users to adjust, and storing and calculating some things internally that alias leaves open and editable by the user. Alias's very limited "undo" capabilities make it even more difficult for beginners. Both are complex enough programs that learning to use them requires a serious time commitment.

MORE SHOPPERS NOTES:

Note that both companies include footage on their demo reels that was not rendered on their own renderers. Use of either company's rendering software in feature films is still a rarity; a much larger share of that market goes to Pixar's Renderman, which can be configured with other software to render scenes animated in Alias or Softimage. Don't assume that you will be able to do everything that they show on their reels, without buying more software, or sometimes writing your own.

Softimage is now owned by Microsoft, and an almost-identical version has been ported to the Windows NT platform. Softimage's main program comes as "Softimage 3D" or "Softimage 3D Extreme." The Extreme option is necessary to get the Mental Ray renderer, metaballs, and a few other features. All necessary animation functions come with the base package, but for work with advanced rendering or visual effects, you will want Extreme.

Alias Research was acquired by Silicon Graphics Inc., along with its former competitor, Wavefront. Silicon Graphics now sells all of the products of Alias and of Wavefront under the brand name Alias | Wavefront. They are still two different systems: don't confuse the particle capabilities of Wavefront's Dynamation or rendering capabilities of Wavefront's IPR with Alias features. In a future, next-generation product called "Maya," Alias | Wavefront plans to merge the best features of both packages into one. I have only been discussing the Alias side of their current product line in this comparison.

Alias has a confusing array of options and bundles. All of the features and functions that I have discussed here are available from Alias Power Animator with the Advanced Animation option. It would seriously handicap character-animation or visual effects work to try to run Alias without the Advanced Animation module. The Power Modelling option, however, is probably not needed by most companies in the entertainment industry, and even without Power Modelling, Alias already provides a more complete range of high-end modelling tools than any Softimage configuration.

Alias | Wavefront list prices are more subject to negotiation than Softimage list prices. You will get much better deals if the sales people know that you are comparing and considering multiple software products.

NEXT GENERATION PRODUCTS:

Both companies promise "next-generation" products that will greatly improve many of these areas. Alias's new Maya product looks very impressive, and seems to finally beat Softimage's speed of interactivity for animation, which used to be Softimage's main advantage. Additional functionality in areas such as soft-body dynamics are unrivaled in any other package, and its new scripting language will add greatly to what a high-end user can achieve with it. Softimage also promises a "next-generation product," but seems to be about a year behind Alias in its plans to release it.

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Home | Info | March 98 update
SOFTIMAGE vs. ALIAS by Jeremy Birn Jeremy Birn uses both Softimage 3D and Alias Power Animator in production work. This article is based on a comparison of Softimage 3D Extreme version 3.7 for the SGI and Alias Power Animator version 8 .0 with Advanced Animation. As we move through the production process, from building models, to animating, to rendering, there are advantages and disadvantages to each product.
MODELLING: Softimage gives you most of the tools you'll need to model a character or an environment. It has a few "missing links" in its modelling system when it comes to fitting together different parts of a character seamlessly, or more advanced modelling of industrial products, but it has basically full polygonal modelling, modelling with b-spline patches, metaballs, and a limited set of trimmed NURBS tools. It has yet to implement a number of more advanced NURBS functions, such as fillets, birails, intersect>trim, NURBS booleans, etc. Alias has long held a reputation as the top modelling system, with a very mature and complete toolset for trimmed NURBS modelling, making it well suited for modelling creatures and characters, industrial design, architecture, and many other applications. Many companies use alias just for its modelling capabilities, then export the models to animate in other software. Its polygon modelling functions are slightly more limited than its NURBS, but still competitive. It only supports metaballs through a very limited plug-in.
ANIMATION: Softimage's speed and interactivity, and ease-of-use in areas like its animation curve editor, put it far ahead of Alias in the opinion of most character animators. Many companies use Softimage just for its animation capabilities, even if they model and render in other software. Softimage has a powerful range of inverse kinematics, many deformation tools for interactively reshaping your models, many plug-in motion effects, and shape animation for facial animation or other 3D morphing. Animation in Softimage can be created and edited without struggling against the software, even with complex scenes and high-polygon models that would slow Alias to a crawl. Alias has an extremely complete feature-set, but can be painfully slow for character animation on a ordinary mid-range SGI. Simply scrubbing back and forth through an animation can become difficult or impossible when you have a character with a complex skeleton and geometry. Alias lacks equivalents of some of Softimage's most powerful deformation tools, such as lattice deformation and deformation on a surface. Alias's Warp lights add a useful new type of deformation that is fairly fast and interactive to use, and has no exact duplicate in Softimage. A notable exception to Alias's sluggishness is its soundsync module, which gives a fast, interactive system for facial and lipsynch animation, outperforming anything now possible in Softimage for talking characters.
RENDERING: Softimage is in the middle of a difficult transition between an old and a new renderer. The old Softimage renderer is a fast raytracer, but lacks features that are now expected even in many lower-priced systems, like lens-flares, displacement mapping, particles, and atmosphere, and is somewhat quirky and bug-ridden in areas like motion blur, depth of field, and field rendering. Softimage's newer Mental Ray renderer is very promising and powerful, and opened to plug-in shaders in a way that could make it comparable to Renderman. However, many features are still too slow to use in some productions. At this version, it is not completely integrated into the program, and yet is greatly handicapped by the old user interface for texturing and lighting, so much that a user can't layer multiple 3D textures onto a model, can't rotate a UV map applied to a surface, and can't project a map seamlessly onto multiple components at once. With faster rendering, tighter integration into the animation system, and a new interface for texturing and lighting controls in Softimage, Mental Ray could become a more useful high-end tool in the future. Alias's texturing and lighting are superb and full-featured, making it very desirable for advanced animation and rendering projects. It has two renderers, a raycaster and a raytracer. The raytracer doesn't support motion-blur, which limits its usefulness in production. The raycaster is a very powerful and controllable renderer, and the combination of high-quality texture, lighting, and shading, atmospheric, volumetric and optical effects, have helped its users continue to produce an amazing body of creative work. It seems as though every time I use this renderer, I discover more of its depth and power. The speed is generally faster than Softimage's mental ray, but not quite as fast as the old Softimage renderer.
PARTICLES: Softimage doesn't yet support particles in either renderer. A limited utility called Particle ships with Softimage. It looks like a junior version of Wavefront's Dynamation, but lacks the sophistication of control over particle behavior. The particles it renders have a limited range of appearances, and must be rendered within the particle utility and composited over your 3D renderings, so that they will not cast shadows into the scene, or be illuminated by the lighting in the scene, or be influenced by texture maps in the scene. I have rarely heard of Softimage's particles being used in high-end professional work, and am glad to hear that Softimage will try to replace this utility with built-in particles at some point in the future. Particle motion can be exported and applied through a plug-in to objects within Softimage, making this potentially useful as an alternate dynamic simulation engine for models within the program. Alias's particles make Alias a must-have for any visual effects business. A unique range of rendering possibilities and tight integration with alias's texture and lighting system gives this system an amazing range of capabilities, from the most subtle touch in a scene to dramatic visual effects. True volumetric particles help build smoke, atmospheric effects, sparks, and fire. Blobby particles work well for fluid and water effects, appearing similar to little metaballs. Convincing particle-based hair and fur can be emitted from surfaces, that cast shadows onto objects, responds to forces like wind and character motion, and can be controlled by texture maps for its location, coloration, thickness and length, and other attributes, although more advanced effects like hair can require a great deal of rendering time. Some companies have bought Alias for its particle rendering abilities alone, and have not been disappointed with their investment.
PLUG-INS AND OPENED ARCHITECTURE: Softimage ships with many plug-in effects for modelling and animation, and more are available for free download on-line, and sold commercially by other companies. Some Softimage plug-ins, such as Shrinkwrap, provide useful tools that have no equivalent in Alias. The Mental Ray renderer is very open to plug-in shaders, providing another level of opened architecture, and several companies offer additional Mental Ray shader libraries. Softimage's availability on Windows NT is already greatly expanding its total number of seats, making it a larger market for 4th party development than it was as a UNIX-only program. Alias has started supporting plug-ins more recently than Softimage, and has fewer of them. Even though Alias is primarily a NURBS-based program, most of the plug-ins available are for polygonal modelling. Alias's renderer technically supports plug-in custom shaders, but they are not addressable within the alias user interface, so this is a rarely used and unsupported option.
EASE OF USE: Softimage is generally simpler and easier to get started with. Alias is a deeper, more complex program, with several times as many dialog boxes, parameters, and controls. Once you have learned both these systems, sometimes Softimage becomes very challenging when you run into limits of its functionality, and you might find some more advanced functions much easier to achieve successfully in Alias. Generally Alias is designed as more of a high-end system, with Softimage optimizing more factors for general use, including "hard-coding" many parameters that Alias allows users to adjust, and storing and calculating some things internally that alias leaves open and editable by the user. Alias's very limited "undo" capabilities make it even more difficult for beginners. Both are complex enough programs that learning to use them requires a serious time commitment.
MORE SHOPPERS NOTES: Note that both companies include footage on their demo reels that was not rendered on their own renderers. Use of either company's rendering software in feature films is still a rarity; a much larger share of that market goes to Pixar's Renderman, which can be configured with other software to render scenes animated in Alias or Softimage. Don't assume that you will be able to do everything that they show on their reels, without buying more software, or sometimes writing your own. Softimage is now owned by Microsoft, and an almost-identical version has been ported to the Windows NT platform. Softimage's main program comes as "Softimage 3D" or "Softimage 3D Extreme." The Extreme option is necessary to get the Mental Ray renderer, metaballs, and a few other features. All necessary animation functions come with the base package, but for work with advanced rendering or visual effects, you will want Extreme. Alias Research was acquired by Silicon Graphics Inc., along with its former competitor, Wavefront. Silicon Graphics now sells all of the products of Alias and of Wavefront under the brand name Alias \| Wavefront. They are still two different systems: don't confuse the particle capabilities of Wavefront's Dynamation or rendering capabilities of Wavefront's IPR with Alias features. In a future, next-generation product called "Maya," Alias \| Wavefront plans to merge the best features of both packages into one. I have only been discussing the Alias side of their current product line in this comparison. Alias has a confusing array of options and bundles. All of the features and functions that I have discussed here are available from Alias Power Animator with the Advanced Animation option. It would seriously handicap character-animation or visual effects work to try to run Alias without the Advanced Animation module. The Power Modelling option, however, is probably not needed by most companies in the entertainment industry, and even without Power Modelling, Alias already provides a more complete range of high-end modelling tools than any Softimage configuration. Alias \| Wavefront list prices are more subject to negotiation than Softimage list prices. You will get much better deals if the sales people know that you are comparing and considering multiple software products.
NEXT GENERATION PRODUCTS: Both companies promise "next-generation" products that will greatly improve many of these areas. Alias's new Maya product looks very impressive, and seems to finally beat Softimage's speed of interactivity for animation, which used to be Softimage's main advantage. Additional functionality in areas such as soft-body dynamics are unrivaled in any other package, and its new scripting language will add greatly to what a high-end user can achieve with it. Softimage also promises a "next-generation product," but seems to be about a year behind Alias in its plans to release it. Home \| Info

March 1998 update:

The article above was updated through late 1997, and accurately explains the reasons why the productions on this site are split between work done in Alias and Softimage.

Thank you to all of the people who have e-mailed about this article. Regarding the request to update this article now that Maya has shipped, I don't plan to write about Maya until I have completed a few productions using it myself. I encourage shoppers to go request a demo of Maya from Alias | Wavefront if they want to look, but I will not attempt to summarize it here. I've even gotten some e-mail suggesting that I should update my description of Softimage's planned "Sumatra" product, based only on press releases from Softimage. There may be a significant delay before I write a new article comparing any newer products.

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