Fabric Engine EOL

[rray]

Thank you for your interest in Fabric Engine. Please note that we are no longer developing our software platform and tools.

(http://fabricengine.com/)

Just saw this posted on the mailing list. Unbelievable... what happened here

[Draise]

[Bullit]

Technical GFX is a first a narrative problem.

[jonmoore]

After all their hard efforts, really feel for the FE crew. Their generosity of spirit as well as intellect was central to the Soft community long before FE so I'm sure as one door closes for them others will open.

[anhungxadieu]

So sad!

[MauricioPC]

That's really a shame.

[Hirazi Blue]

Shocking...

[Mathaeus]

Perhaps this is somehow related to upcoming 'Bifrost's ICE-ish environment for Maya', mentioned in Maya 2018 thread. As we already know, some Fabric investors are very very very familiar with AD. What I'm saying is my personal theory, anyway there's really a lot of confirming signs on internet. Bad news for 3d apps with small user bases, again.

[wesserbro]

i thought bifrÖst is just a node system for najad water simulation, nah?

[McNistor]

Am I being cynical if I say this doesn't surprise me at all? Not that I'm happy about it or the fact that I fell like I'll have to pull a "I told you so", but I did express skepticism (in some forgotten thread) about investing time and money in such a small platform/company. It's always a gamble, big risk, big gains, most of the time it will fail. Perfectly in accord with the statistics regarding small startups.
I hope its creators are going to land on both feet financially, which is very likely since they're very good coders. I wish them good luck and hope to see them get into a bigger company where their work will have a bigger impact. [cough]sidefx[cough]

[Mathaeus]

i thought bifrÖst is just a node system for najad water simulation, nah?

for now... anyway let wait and see, my crystal bowl probably is not the best source....

[McNistor]

my crystal bowl probably is not the best source....

Especially if you fill it with milk&cereal... hahaha!

[wesserbro]

It's always a gamble, big risk, big gains, most of the time it will fail. Perfectly in accord with the statistics regarding small startups.

indeed, any business is a risk, more so startup. But statistics works only if we say have 100 random startups and know nothing about them, we could say ~90 of them will fail.
but if we speak about certain product, we can place a bet higher or lower regarding what the product is offering and how we evaluate that offer on the market.
I would say its not the idea itself that failed, but that they just hadn't crossed the threshold were technical direction becomes artist-friendly.

[wesserbro]

i think either i have vietnam flashbacks replacing my recent memories or someone edited my previous message

[McNistor]

Certainly, introducing more criteria will yield a more accurate result regarding any approximation. Do you think that s/w industry fares better than startups in other industries when it comes to success rates? My intuition, which is of course not data, tells that it's quite possible that s/w startups have a lower chance of success. The only upside for s/w is that investment is relatively low compared to others. Anyway, it's a non-important side point.
Regarding your point in bold font, I'm not sure about the artist-friendly aspect of Fabric. One has to just look at Mudbox, which is, not even arguably, a lot more artist friendly than say, Zbrush.
My very take on this is that their target user-base was(is) already congregated around one or two solution already established in the industry. Pretty much the most difficult thing to overcome for any startup: get market share from the current companies. If it's not revolutionary AND extremely well marketed, it's definitely DoA.

[McNistor]

Or maybe a "Fabric person" will chime in to put an end to the speculation. Let's hold hands and hope together