We were recently working on a feather system for an owl character and we were bumping into all sorts of problems. We are still bumping into those problems and the issue isn’t solved yet but that is the subject of another post.
What I wanted to talk about in this post is an article we came about while we were searching the net for similar solutions. It was a blog post done by Jo Plaete concerning a feather system he had created that had a very unique interface. We all know how dull some of XSI’s property pages and UIs can be and I was very impressed by the Flash interface he was using for his feather creation script.
I contacted Jo Plaete for more info and it just turned out that he was working on an article to explain the steps he had taken for the development and use of a Flash user interface in XSI.


If you’re even remotely interested in scripting in XSI I think that you should check out this very informative and interesting article. Even though it requires knowledge of Actionscript, it can be extremely liberating and useful to be able to include such tools in your arsenal. Actionscript is like any other scripting language and Flash can be a very fun software to learn and frankly it doesn’t have a very steep learning curve.
The possibilities are endless and the result can be very dynamic, interactive and even better looking controls and synoptics.