Hi Alberto, just to let you know, there are several "prefabricated rigs" that are fully customizable in xsi (there are even custom body parts, already scripted, say for tails and spines). Then there are also some motion capture samples in the net view (which also holds some textures).
As for geometry, there's the character desinger and you can get some ugly "man and woman" models (which with some tweaking are a great start for your custom model).
For file input and output, Xsi can export to .X format (via the plugin found in the web) which i've found works nicely with ultimate unwrap to get content in .b3d format quite fast wo. so much work.
About those extra functions in your first topic, from an animator viewpoint (specially the fcurve editor), i wouldn't like to have to animate without them, because it is with their aid that you can really put some juice in the movement (does ease-in, ease-out sounds familiar?), the way stuff moves in space. Then there's also the dope sheet (great for basic timing and some pose stuff).
Maybe the animation mixer seems nonsense to you for games, but in reality, it lets create different motions for different characters in a snap.. sharing and blending.. you know, it is "character" animation, not moving an array of robots which have the exactly same motion (boring).
There's a .bvh import function in xsi, it's just that you've to play with it before getting it to work correctly and then you'll have lots of "prefabs" motion clips floating in the net (which btw, are way easy to edit, again with the fcurves editor).
If you wanna develop for consoles, I know that some game content has been developed with Softimage (the father of Xsi) and that there are several plugs for consoles (if you are a licensed developer, nintendo for Softimage, psx for softimage and Xbox for xsi).
As you state you are just interested in animation, i will just mention rendermaps, normal map generators, and scripting. So even for games, these tool indeed fits quite nice, at least for me.
As for geometry, there's the character desinger and you can get some ugly "man and woman" models (which with some tweaking are a great start for your custom model).
For file input and output, Xsi can export to .X format (via the plugin found in the web) which i've found works nicely with ultimate unwrap to get content in .b3d format quite fast wo. so much work.
About those extra functions in your first topic, from an animator viewpoint (specially the fcurve editor), i wouldn't like to have to animate without them, because it is with their aid that you can really put some juice in the movement (does ease-in, ease-out sounds familiar?), the way stuff moves in space. Then there's also the dope sheet (great for basic timing and some pose stuff).
Maybe the animation mixer seems nonsense to you for games, but in reality, it lets create different motions for different characters in a snap.. sharing and blending.. you know, it is "character" animation, not moving an array of robots which have the exactly same motion (boring).
There's a .bvh import function in xsi, it's just that you've to play with it before getting it to work correctly and then you'll have lots of "prefabs" motion clips floating in the net (which btw, are way easy to edit, again with the fcurves editor).
If you wanna develop for consoles, I know that some game content has been developed with Softimage (the father of Xsi) and that there are several plugs for consoles (if you are a licensed developer, nintendo for Softimage, psx for softimage and Xbox for xsi).
As you state you are just interested in animation, i will just mention rendermaps, normal map generators, and scripting. So even for games, these tool indeed fits quite nice, at least for me.