Autodesk Softimage has a number of tools that let you examine your scene in varying degrees of detail. This chapter includes general information about displaying and working with views. In addition, it describes a number of general-purpose windows and views in detail.
Topics
• Working with Views describes how to work with floating and embedded windows.
• The Explorer is a hierarchical, tree-style display of the contents of your scene that expands from the root. You can perform a wide variety of tasks using the explorer.
• The Quick Filter Box and Scene Search View make it easier to find elements in your scene.
• The Schematic View is a graphical representation of your scene that lets you analyze the way a scene is constructed and see the relationships between objects, material nodes, and texture nodes.
• The Spreadsheet is a grid display of information about scene elements and their parameters. You can organize this information to show specific aspects of your scene, and perform operations on many elements or parameters at once.
• The XSI Explorer is a two-pane view, with an explorer on the left and another view on the right. Use the explorer pane to select an object to isolate in the right pane.
• The Browser is a file-management tool that lets you navigate through scene, project, and other directory structures. You can also use the browser to load scenes, presets, and so on.
• The Preset Manager provides access to all the materials, shaders, and ICE nodes found in the factory, user, and workgroup locations.
• Netview is a web browser that lets you view HTML pages on the Internet or your intranet. You can drag-and-drop images, models, scenes, and add-ons, as well as run scripts and so on.
• The Custom Display Host allows you to run other applications within Softimage.
When and where to use a particular viewing tool depends entirely on what you want to do. For example, if you want to move several objects into a group, you might use the explorer. On the other hand, if you want to change the diffuse shading parameter for 35 separate surface shaders, the spreadsheet is indispensable. To discover what you can do with the general data viewing tools, read on.
Related Information
For information about using the 3D views to display your scene from different points of view, see Viewing and Navigating in 3D Views [Viewing and Playback].
In addition to the general-purpose views described here, there are several special-purpose views that are described elsewhere in the Autodesk Softimage documentation. For example, the envelope weight editor is described in Envelopes [Character Animation].
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