RJ - Thank you for the info, I understood that Mental Ray was the core engine for XSI, this is one of the reasons why I purchased the software. It is very full featured for the price, versus just a Vray, Maxwell, or Brazil product. But it seems very confusing to me yet when you have such a Mental Ray product, do they make tweeks to work within each program, such that we can only share XSI shaders with other XSI users. There appears to be a lot of shaders available for 3DMax, but not quite as many for XSI.
As for Carrara, I saw that Nichod had shaders for Carrara offered for sale, I did not think that they would work in XSI, but hey what do I know.
The textures would be a very portable method for the time being, I still have many more hours of tutorials to get through before I try anything useful. Most of my work is architectural, but I hope to use XSI for more organic and animations work to extend my knowledge. I have tried Hexagon, which I believe to be very useful, but struggled greatly with the training material. I really like the digital tutors series for XSI products, they are easy to follow and well laid out.
Thank you for the answers, and I will keep watching for more details if they develop.
