In Softimage, you always work within the structure of a project. Projects are a system of folders that contain the scenes that you build and all the external files that are referenced in the scenes. A project can contain an unlimited number of scenes. Scene files are by default stored in the Scenes folder under the project and can be recognized by their .scn filename extension.

Projects are used to keep your work organized and provide a level of consistency that can be used to simplify production for a workgroup. A project can exist locally on your machine or shared from a network drive. For a movie, projects could be organized by scene or location. For a television series, you could organize projects by episode, act, or sequence director.

When you open Softimage for the first time, an untitled scene is created in the XSI_SAMPLES project. XSI_SAMPLES is the factory default project, but you can set your own project as the default project that opens with Softimage. The project name displayed in the titlebar at the top of the Softimage interface is the current (active) project.

Softimage can also import and export project lists, which are text files that list projects and their locations. Project lists can be imported and exported automatically, which can allow administrators to make new projects easily and automatically available to a production team.