Fabric Engine for Modo

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Mathaeus
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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by Mathaeus » 05 May 2015, 23:05

Hirazi Blue wrote:The state of our "very own" Fabric subforum makes me wonder
about integrating it in so many new host applications.
We like to think of ourselves as a rather "technical bunch"
and even we seem unable to get a serious discussion on the topic going.
:-?
Yeah for now, I can imagine the advantage only for 'core' developers (imagine... not 'see'). Plus a lot of emotional stuff, where everyone can draw whatever everyone wants, because entire thing is happily undefined. From well known playing with definitions and values, how some guy wrote a feather system in two hours, while the actual thing is, most likely, just a part of prototype, perhaps a copy paste of some common solution, known for ages. For Maxon and, it seems for Foundry too now, great excuse to forget any further trial to match the Maya - 'now you have "the engine" for that'. For SI users, 'honest' way to 'make the transition so much easier' - to Maya, of course....
By the way, in some aspects, concept is completely opposite to ICE, Houdini or Max MCG.
First of all, one advantage of built-in system is, to *do not* go for external plugin, just to get some motion graphics, deformation by two curves and so on.
Another advantage of built - in thing is embedding - it's only scene to be shared, and that's huge advantage. From my small experience, simply it doesn't work if user has to download and install the plugin B in order to use the asset A - somehow like sending a show reel, based on some exotic codec, then asking people to install it.
Finally, using the external plugin as an live, animation operator, that's last thing I'll do, anytime (I do not caching the animated things...).

Anyway, once I'll notice something, looking like usage on daily basis, by at least one thousand of individual users, perhaps I'll be 1001th... In the meantime, there are other things to do.

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FXDude
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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by FXDude » 06 May 2015, 07:07

Mathaeus wrote: For SI users, 'honest' way to 'make the transition so much easier' - to Maya, of course....
of course... :-/
Another advantage of built - in thing is embedding - it's only scene to be shared, and that's huge advantage.
From my small experience, simply it doesn't work if user has to download and install the plugin B in order to use the asset A
Maybe to a certain extent, but in this case it's free and it does look pretty good.
Anyway, once I'll notice something, looking like usage on daily basis, by at least one thousand of individual users, perhaps I'll be 1001th... In the meantime, there are other things to do.
Exlusively looking at numbers eh?... 8-|

SI always had a fraction of users, while being responsible for say 100% of Arnold shaders? (for example)
and if you go to Maya SoUp, most of everything there (not very much) in soft involves stringing a few nodes together to recreate, which would barely justify having an entry on RRay which is a mile and a half long (like inverse proportions of development/user count) full of nifty to pretty elaborate stuff.

In no small way because of Ice but still!

___________

Otherwise, I think the following is at least quite premature at best,
MauricioPC wrote:
They said: Fabric can also do all that ICE can do - but much more powerful.
http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/discu ... 0&p=924356
and from the link..
I'm sure someone could pick nits and bring up technical nuances but essentially yes, as I understand it Fabric Engine is a program agnostic version of the Softimage ICE system.

Yet as far as we can tell to date, not unlike MCG, both in their early stages have exclusively been dealing with mesh (or rig) processing, a reach which would surely expand to some degree...
and although comiplation happens transparently, graphs still need to be compiled,
so it remains to be seen how "transparent" compilation would remain for larger (or insane) graphs.
Though it's still looks to be much more "live" than MCG.


But you know, apart from meshes, Ice can pretty much get and set... whatever SI deals with,
UV's, materials, Weight maps, particles any conceivable parameter can be driven as easily as draggin it to a tree...

And you don't have to expose parameters to tweak/change them,
and however insanely large Ice trees that themselves are made of compounds made of insanely large ice trees... barely makes it flinch, while remaining very fast while always very "live" :ymcowboy:

But back to FE, this is the first time something that's to a certain extent "user friendly" or less user unfriendly, that came from them,
but it's still all very low level nodes (perhaps like Houdini), maybe higher level nodes would come later, but given previous resistance to make more user friendly tools, ... maybe they would come from users, but time will tell on that, Hirazi wondered about Canvas activity here, but it seems the same could be said on FE's own forum.

But maybe it's just too early, so I guess we'll see, for me I would have hoped for SI support before say UE,
to date, it feels like Sketchup would be supported before soft, despite the fairly large proportions of FE users that are SI users (like say Redshift)

Pooby
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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by Pooby » 06 May 2015, 09:58

Its seems odd to recall now, but There used to be little to no information or discussion of ICE either, about 4-5 years ago. For about 2 years after release, ICE seemed quite exclusive except for the most hardcore TD types.
When I started learning it, I felt very much on my own and not a member of the perceived secret club who knew how the hell ICE worked. I had to buy Thiago's training which was about the only thing out there.

Once I started getting into Ice, I started sharing my experiences with ICE through tutorials and demos, and that coincided with many others starting to do the same. Soon it seemed like everyone was sharing stuff and the ICE channel on Vimeo exploded with cool stuff on an almost daily basis.

I have no doubts this pattern will be repeated with Canvas, but a lot sooner. It's not even out yet.
We are employing 2 full time programmers using Fabric to make real-time character systems, so I'm investing a lot into it.

The problems I have had with a lot of stuff I've made in ICE is that ultimately it's in Softimage, which is awesome for when it's a traditional animation or vfx style project with offline rendering etc, but the world is changing.

For example, in ICE I can bring in mocap data and have made my own point cloud based retargetter within. Combined with a tool fabric built for us, we can stream into ICE, the mocap data live from the actor, but ultimately it's contained within Softimage, which like Maya or any DCC, isn't designed to process and stream real time content.

By designing these tools in Fabric, we can not only use them in traditional pipelines, but make tools like this a standalone that can not only stream and retarget, but display on the realtime renderer or potentially stream out to Unreal etc.

Fabric is the only solution which addresses the increasingly important needs of real-time in a fast, elegant and flexible way.

FabricPaul
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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by FabricPaul » 06 May 2015, 15:32

Hi guys - I'm at FMX so this will be short and sweet while I wait for the next session.

Softimage support will be a release feature of Fabric 2.0, don't worry :) Modo, Max, Houdini and C4D will be be in beta.

Helge was asked about the scope/breadth of Fabric compared to ICE - so it's accurate to say that _Fabric_ can do everything that ICE can do and a bunch of other stuff. However, that's not saying the compounds/presets etc are there in Canvas yet. So its kind of like asking 'can C++ do everything ICE can do?'. Hope that clears it up.

Cheers,

Paul

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Mathaeus
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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by Mathaeus » 06 May 2015, 20:59

FXDude wrote:
Mathaeus wrote:
Another advantage of built - in thing is embedding - it's only scene to be shared, and that's huge advantage.
From my small experience, simply it doesn't work if user has to download and install the plugin B in order to use the asset A
Maybe to a certain extent, but in this case it's free and it does look pretty good.
Let's say I think I already know what I'm talking here: even more in case it's free, it has to be as compact as possible, able to show what it can do in very short time. For small example ( but not only one) just a possbility of Houdini to load downloaded files even from USB drive (as it automatically takes it as project folder), it was somehow crucial for my small knowledge of this software.
Anyway there's always way to quickly show what someone wants, beside the drawback of external app. Kind of demo, or something else.
FXDude wrote: Exlusively looking at numbers eh?... 8-|

SI always had a fraction of users, while being responsible for say 100% of Arnold shaders? (for example)
and if you go to Maya SoUp, most of everything there (not very much) in soft involves stringing a few nodes together to recreate, which would barely justify having an entry on RRay which is a mile and a half long (like inverse proportions of development/user count) full of nifty to pretty elaborate stuff.

In no small way because of Ice but still!
With inevitable 'I hate to say that', even in 'Golden Ice Age' (this was when Pooby joined the board :) - ok now seriously sometime around 2009-2012 ), I've been witness of sooo many sad, background stories. Like producers of small team, hunting across nine European countries, for another ICE guy, once first ICE guy left the team. At the end, finishing the project without ICE. And so on and so on....
Numbers always were important. When I come to XSI with XSI 4, I believed it will spread a bit more. Around XSI 6, it was clear for me, how entire story is going to nowhere. But, also I was a huge Softimage fanboy ( even never used SI 3d thing), had Jeremy Birn's books, all that. Obviously this emotional set is not transferable - after all, it's better to do not repeat the same again.
Sad day a year ago, it was a sad day, but yeah I'll admit, also a day of relaxation. Finally it was over.
Last edited by Mathaeus on 07 May 2015, 00:02, edited 1 time in total.

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Hirazi Blue
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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by Hirazi Blue » 06 May 2015, 22:40

Pooby wrote:We are employing 2 full time programmers using Fabric to make real-time character systems, so I'm investing a lot into it.
If I could employ "2 full time programmers', I probably could even put ALGOL to good use... While that is a deliberately silly comparison, it is indicative of the main problem I see with Fabric: it's insanely powerful, but probably mainly for larger scale projects, the kind of projects "2 full time programmers" come in handy for. I hope Canvas will be able to change this, but I am doubtful...
Stay safe, sane & healthy!

FabricPaul
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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by FabricPaul » 06 May 2015, 22:52

If you want to build smaller 'utility' tools, you can do that as well. Canvas supports the full spectrum as it's just visual programming for KL. It's like pointing at Lagoa and saying 'see? ICE is only good for large scale R&D projects'. If you want to build large, complex systems then you can. At least wait until you've used it :)

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Hirazi Blue
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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by Hirazi Blue » 06 May 2015, 22:59

FabricPaul wrote:At least wait until you've used it :)
That would seem to be a bit condescending.
I did study the documentation quite a bit before reaching my (potentially wrong, I'm aware of that) conclusion.
Stay safe, sane & healthy!

FabricPaul
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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by FabricPaul » 06 May 2015, 23:11

No condescension - it's merely a request that you draw conclusions once you've used Canvas. Fabric was designed to handle everything from simple tools all the way to large complex applications. The docs reflect the full capacity of the framework.

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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by SamHowell » 07 May 2015, 11:52

Wow. I stay away from the forums for a while and I come back to all this huge game changing news. My only reservation with Fabric up until now has been it's dependance on Autodesk owned software. I guess this has ended in a big way. Fabric in Modo and C4D is one thing, but Fabric in Houdini? The mind really does boggle. Like Pooby said, they struck down Softimage ICE and it has risen stronger than we could possibly imagine. :p
XSI_Obi.jpg

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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by owei » 07 May 2015, 12:18

...as far as I see, the current changes in the DCC market are obvious. The EOL of Soft did mark a turning point and made it quite obvious, that relying on AD as a software provider is nearly a non calculable risk for companies, bigger and smaller ones.
By making Fabric content more and more independent from the host application and bringing ICE-like performance to them is a big deal. Portability of assets is the key, so an integration into Houdini also makes absolute sense. And don´t forget that all stuff done in Fabric can be GPU accelerated by default. Just think of an particle system, an fluid sim, a rigged character or whatever built in and with Canvas can be ported from one app to the other just by copy and paste...

cheers,
oli

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MauricioPC
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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by MauricioPC » 07 May 2015, 22:35

Hey guys ... just to let you know. Modo 901 is coming May 21st.

https://www.thefoundry.co.uk/events/live/modo901/

FabricPaul
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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by FabricPaul » 22 May 2015, 23:06

Posted elsewhere but since it's relevant to this thread, the FMX presentation is up: http://fabricengine.com/fmx2015/

Eric Mootz presents the MODO work around 2/3 of the way through.

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MauricioPC
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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by MauricioPC » 23 May 2015, 01:03

Cool! Thanks for sharing Paul. Mootz has been modofied.

I would love to hear his input on 901, if is that much better as the Foundry is saying.

-EDIT-

Just saw the presentation. Pretty cool! Congrats to all involved.

P.S.: Paul, you almost got dragged to rant about EOL Softimage. :D

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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by El Burritoh » 29 May 2015, 03:02

With Eric on board at FE now, and his experience with the Modo SDK and connection with the Modo devs, I'm really optimistic that good things will come of this.
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FabricPaul
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Re: Fabric Engine for Modo

Post by FabricPaul » 29 May 2015, 03:19

MauricioPC wrote:Cool! Thanks for sharing Paul. Mootz has been modofied.

I would love to hear his input on 901, if is that much better as the Foundry is saying.

-EDIT-

Just saw the presentation. Pretty cool! Congrats to all involved.

P.S.: Paul, you almost got dragged to rant about EOL Softimage. :D
We just announced Eric as a full-time employee of Fabric, he's working on the Softimage integration at the moment - I'll get him to post something here when it's demonstrable.

And yes, I nearly went off topic - instead I ranted about rigging. The woman who asked me the question told me afterwards that she enjoyed my rant, so at least one person was entertained ;)

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