Many artists who relied on the legacy 3D package Softimage XSI were left stranded after Autodesk permanently stopped distributing and supporting the program years ago, making it impossible for thousands of specialists to renew licenses or open long-standing projects. Requests on the company’s official forums for a free archival copy to recover decades of work went unanswered by the rights holder.
Against this backdrop, French CG specialist Laurent Le Flem — better known online as threedslider and tecz.cg — set out to build an independent replacement. He decided to create a free, open-source package named Blackdot (project) aimed at reproducing the ergonomics, philosophy and core tools of Softimage XSI. A self-taught programmer without experience at large vendors like Autodesk, Le Flem combined development work with practical experience in visual effects; his previous notable effort was an attempt to port the Cycles renderer from Blender into LightWave 3D. Still, he has described building a full 3D editor single-handedly as a far greater challenge.
The project’s origins trace back to July 2015, when Le Flem tried to base his work on the source code of the abandoned open editor Moonlight Creator. That initial plan—to adapt existing components—was eventually abandoned after years of experimentation, the author saying the foreign codebase proved too unstable and unsuitable for continued development.
By 2020 he announced a rewrite from scratch in modern C++ with an object-oriented architecture, promising to restore polygon modeling and the distinctive ICE nodal system for procedural effects. The published roadmap envisioned a broad feature set: full rigging, liquid, hair and cloth simulations, built-in sculpting, tracking and a custom renderer.
When users questioned whether a project of that scale could be accomplished without a development team, Le Flem conceded their doubts were reasonable. He said he had tried to recruit volunteer programmers but received almost no responses, and so pressed on alone, hoping demonstrable progress would attract contributors.
In April 2023 Le Flem briefly shifted strategy, posting to the Blender Artists community with a proposal to implement Blackdot as a modification of Blender 3.5, reworking Blender’s interface to resemble Softimage XSI. The move drew criticism: three years earlier he had rejected Blender’s codebase for its Python-centric structure, and some users viewed the new proposal skeptically. One forum member, thorn, criticized the approach as creating an empty GitHub page with only a description and no working prototype, suggesting it looked like an attempt to offload the heavy lifting onto others.
After encountering that distrust, Le Flem returned to building an independent application. In June 2025 he presented an early prototype written in C++ and using OpenGL within Microsoft Visual Studio, showing a simple coordinate grid and the vertices of a base cube. A further demonstration in March 2026 on the developer’s channel introduced an updated shell called Softimage Style Modeler, with primitive polygon manipulation and basic geometry creation tools implemented.
More than a decade after the effort began, the Blackdot repository on GitHub remains small—only 15 stars and a minimal set of auxiliary files—while the project continues to live mainly through periodic demos and announcements. Veterans of computer graphics still recall Softimage XSI for its convenience, but the industry views solo attempts to recreate that class of software with skepticism given the technical lead of modern tools such as Blender and the substantial resources required to produce a fully featured 3D package.