QuickFire, Estes-Cox industries. Modeled in ProE (Wildfire), translated with PolyTrans, surfaced, lit & rendered in SoftImage | XSI/mental ray.

In an ever-increasing effort to offer the absolute best technology solutions to their clients, CraneDigital has added SoftImage XSI to its already robust 3D tool kit. "XSI represents about the best you can get in commercial 3D animation & rendering products," said John Crane, CraneDigital's head bottle washer and potato peeler. "We've used just about everything else out there in an effort to get "the look" we're after. Our clients expect quality, and XSI produces quality our clients can see. There's a noticeable difference between the renderings we've done in other applications and the renderings done in XSI. They can see it."

Pee-Wee Fighter, Estes-Cox industries. Modeled in ProE (Wildfire), translated with PolyTrans, surfaced, lit & rendered in SoftImage | XSI/mental ray.

XSI has long been acknowledged as an industrial strength animation tool in the proving grounds of Hollywood, and the brutally fast-paced 3D gaming industry. These demanding environments have honed XSI's tool set into powerful, fast and uncompromising quality deliverables designed to keep pace with the fast-paced deadlines of the commercial market.

"We recently finsished a piece for Popular Mechanics that would have been next to impossible were it not for XSI. What they wanted was insane. The only way you can deliver 'insane' is with XSI," said Crane. "Clients want what they want. That's why we use XSI. Iterate, iterate, iterate 'til the cows come home and you hit that perfect balance-of light, composition, texture, and the intangible that makes an image great."

With the acquisition of XSI, CraneDigital has also added 6 additional processors worth of leading rendering engine mental ray bumping up total capacity to 18 processors worth of mental ray running on the render farm. "This is truly awesome speed and rendering horsepower for a small studio like ours," said Crane. "We can render virtually any assignment in house now, keeping total control over speed, production quality, multi-pass jobs, creative tweaks and accountability without being subject to third party variables. And this is just the beginning. Since moving to the rack, the potential for adding more and more servers over time is real-especially when you factor in Linux and its ability to manage large banks of servers. We're just getting warmed up."

CraneDigital has worked with some of the largest institutions in the country over the past 11 years of business, from national defense contractors and large, multi-national corporations, to small non-profit and start-up efforts. "We're focused on quality and service," says Crane. "It's pretty simple: do what you say you're going to do; let your yes be yes, and never-ever sacrifice quality for quantity."

CraneDigital is located in beautiful Fort Collins, Colorado, northern Colorado's gateway to some of the greatest outdoor opportunities in the United States. When John's not camped in front of his HP workstation he's fly fishing the Big T or Cache la Poudre river, in search of trophy browns. For more information about CraneDigital, please call (970) 229-1462.

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