Managing Workgroups with .wkg Files
You can store the workgroup paths to which you want to connect in one or more files with a .wkg extension, and then place these files in the Data folder of the Softimage installation (Factory) location or User location. Softimage automatically scans these locations at startup and if any .wkg files are found, Softimage will connect to the workgroup path of each entry.
A .wkg file is a simple text file that can contain multiple directory paths. Each path must be added on a separate line and each line must end with a newline character.
Many more attributes have been made available for controlling layouts and relational views. In addition, they are all now available while editing a view by right-clicking in a pane and choosing Set View Properties.
You no longer need to restart Softimage after connecting to a workgroup to use any layouts installed in it.
There's a new Toolbar Spacer in the Toolbar Widgets group that you can use to create a horizontal or vertical space in a toolbar. See Custom Toolbars.
You can now use Python for scripts in synoptic views. See Creating and Editing Synoptic Files.
The following file types are now saved as Unicode (UTF-8):
This means that they support multi-byte characters, including Japanese and other languages.
In addition to new environment variables for controlling High Quality display mode, there is a new environment variable SI_DISABLE_SHADERDEF_CACHE. Set this variable to any value to disable the shader definition cache. This can be useful if you are developing shaders and don't want to continually refresh the cache. See Environment Variables.
