www.si-community.com

Hello everyone,

I'm excited to announce that we have released version 1.1.0 of the Kraken Rigging Framework. This is our second release which mainly focused on UI / UX work and also updating the system to work with Fabric Engine 2.0 and higher.

Kraken is a cross-platform Rigging Framework that provides a flexible, customizable and extendable framework. Kraken leverages Fabric Engine’s Splice / Canvas API to maintain consistent evaluation of solvers and deformers. Kraken’s abstracted Python graph provides a layer where complex rigs are defined, with which DCC plug-ins translate into DCC specific build instructions then scene elements are output.


Download here:
http://fabric-engine.github.io/Kraken/#download

Installation Tutorial:
https://vimeo.com/151921771

Release notes here:
http://kraken-rigging-framework.readthe ... sion-1-1-0


With the update to use Fabric 2.0, users are now able to construct solvers using the Canvas interface. Users who are familiar with Softimage's ICE interface should feel at home using Canvas for creating solvers using a nodal interface. Those solvers can then be exported as presets and be added to Kraken's Python based rig components. We still support solvers written in Fabric Engine's scripting language KL, too. You now get the best of both worlds.

We're eager to expand the community and encourage people do give it a spin and provide feedback. We've gotten some great feedback recently and the great folks over at Oculus Story Studio have had significant interest and have already contributed back to the project. Looking forward to others joining the community.

You can also read a bit more about what we've been working on and where we are heading in the preview blog post we wrote up last week here:
http://fabricengine.com/kraken-1-1-update/


Visit the Kraken web site and forum at the following links:
http://fabric-engine.github.io/Kraken

http://forums.fabricengine.com/categories/kraken

Great! Now I'm waiting for video where some octopus turns in to flying spider, then flying spider turns into walking unicorn. You know, rigging video can't go without that:)
Ok now seriously
1: is it possible to get it into Canvas, now. Last your answer I sow is from November.
2. more general question (and forget me if I missed the point) -let's say I want to build the deformation system directly in FE - is it Kraken who outputs arrays of matrices (or something like) - or it's my part to build the connection.

Mathaeus wrote:Great! Now I'm waiting for video where some octopus turns in to flying spider, then flying spider turns into walking unicorn. You know, rigging video can't go without that:)
Ok now seriously
1: is it possible to get it into Canvas, now. Last your answer I sow is from November.

It is now possible to create solvers in Canvas, and for those solvers to be called upon from Kraken yes. We have a separate UI for building rigs from Canvas.

2. more general question (and forget me if I missed the point) -let's say I want to build the deformation system directly in FE - is it Kraken who outputs arrays of matrices (or something like) - or it's my part to build the connection.

Kraken will build the entire rig in your DCC. Canvas solvers will drive objects like nulls or joints for you to then use standard deformation techniques from there. However we are going to be investigating how to streamline the solvers and graph so that you can possibly have solvers feeding other solvers transforms and such so that if you did have a system that was deforming geometry based on transforms being fed in, this would be possible too.

Continuing in the series here are a few more covering the basic concepts behind Kraken.

1. Installing for Softimage - https://vimeo.com/152163192
2. Installing for Maya - https://vimeo.com/152163190
3. Creating Nodes & Connections - https://vimeo.com/152163193
4. Building Guides & Rigs - https://vimeo.com/152163191
5. Configs - https://vimeo.com/152421736

Custom Component Deep Dive

1. Custom Directories https://vimeo.com/152989414
2. Sketch Component Classes https://vimeo.com/152989426
3. Component IO https://vimeo.com/152989423
4. Guide Init https://vimeo.com/152989425
5. Guide Load & Save Data https://vimeo.com/152989424
6. Guide Rig Data & Registration https://vimeo.com/152990823
7. Rig Controls & Joints https://vimeo.com/152990822
8. Rig Constraints https://vimeo.com/152989418
9. Rig Load Data https://vimeo.com/152989422
10. Test Component https://vimeo.com/152989413