Introducing Canvas - visual programming for Fabric 2.0

[FabricPaul]

We do have a hunch about what people will go for, and that's an array of different tools with seamless data sharing capabilities. Fabric makes that possible - by enabling a lot of people to build those tools and having them available wherever people want them. That's the vision - not another monolithic application. Portable data, portable tools to work on that data. It obviates the need for another DCC.

Anyway - I'm off to tend the chickens PM me if you want to speak further, but I don't want to keep hashing over this: we're not making a complete DCC because we are more interested in being a platform.

Cheers,

Paul

[FabricPaul]

Here's a video from EricT he made this weekend (he is one of our testers) - this is an ICE solver that he converted to Canvas:

[FXDude]

Cool, but in Maya

[mc_axe]

Since you guys talk on potentials. I have a weird question im not so much into code-ing
(So my question might be rly stupid)

Does Fabric intend to jump at some point on general programming? Out of Dcc`s
i mean convert the output to other languages
I m not sure if i know what im talkin about

[FabricPaul]

I'm not sure I understand the question - what would be the goal of doing this? Output for a game runtime?

[FXDude]

I think he means visual general purpose (not-necessarily CG related) programing.

[mc_axe]

I'm not sure I understand the question - what would be the goal of doing this? Output for a game runtime?

yep general purpose thnx FX

For example to have compounds and nodes in fabric, that can be converted to many languages
But of course if you are going to do something like that, you will start with 1 language first.

And since KL is much into realtime 3d, .... yes possibly a language that can run executables possibly for a game runtime.
Or an app with dynamics or whatever

Just saying is that even possible? or im talking nonsense?

[FabricPaul]

Ok, I understand. Fabric can be used for general computation tasks (the core of Fabric is a general computation engine, there is nothing 3D or even graphics specific about it), and can be extended to support different data types. We'll have some samples soon showing some non-3D use cases. The DFG (and in fact the visual programming front-end) are completely modular and independent of the rest of Fabric.

Because Fabric uses LLVM (a JIT compiler) we can work with other LLVM-based languages. All LLVM-based languages are compiling down to the same thing, and that's how we do the clever stuff with CUDA and HSA for GPU compute. So... you can extrapolate from there on some of the things that might be possible within our graph. We are working on some cool things there with one of our accounts, if it works it will be awesome/terrifying in equal measure LLVM is really something.

We have considered outputting another language (C/C# for instance) for runtime cases. It's interesting but not something we're pushing on right now - we'd rather work with a game company directly than do anything speculative. Whenever we talk to game companies, they're more interested in using Fabric in the usual DCC and taking care of run-time themselves. So nothing right now on that.

I hope that helps.

[mc_axe]

Ok, I understand. Fabric can be used for general computation tasks (the core of Fabric is a general computation engine, there is nothing 3D or even graphics specific about it), and can be extended to support different data types. We'll have some samples soon showing some non-3D use cases. The DFG (and in fact the visual programming front-end) are completely modular and independent of the rest of Fabric.

Because Fabric uses LLVM (a JIT compiler) we can work with other LLVM-based languages. All LLVM-based languages are compiling down to the same thing, and that's how we do the clever stuff with CUDA and HSA for GPU compute. So... you can extrapolate from there on some of the things that might be possible within our graph. We are working on some cool things there with one of our accounts, if it works it will be awesome/terrifying in equal measure LLVM is really something.

We have considered outputting another language (C/C# for instance) for runtime cases. It's interesting but not something we're pushing on right now - we'd rather work with a game company directly than do anything speculative. Whenever we talk to game companies, they're more interested in using Fabric in the usual DCC and taking care of run-time themselves. So nothing right now on that.

I hope that helps.

Gr8 thnx !

[caledonian_tartan]

Hi Paul
As i see much potential for a 3rd party open source DCC building around fabric engine, What's are your views on that thought?

[FabricPaul]

Hi there - we're not going to open-source the core technology of FE, which tends to put a bit of a dampener on things

So there's nothing preventing people giving away FE tools that they build, and we in turn have committed to giving FE away for free to individual users. But knowing the OSS crowd, I think this is still insufficient as their concern will be around long-term certainty of a commercial platform.

So - ecosystem of free Fabric tools, absolutely. We're all for that (and yes, it works to our advantage), but OSS is something else altogether.

Happy to speak more about this...

Cheers,

Paul

[Bullit]

I don't know if this was already asked, but Canvas will have compounds like ICE? This was very helpful.

[EricTRocks]

It already has presets that you can save out and re-import and re-use. They can be custom functions or sub-graphs (compounds in Softimage terms).

Eric T.

[Bullit]

Thanks Eric.

[FabricPaul]

Thought you might enjoy this one - image processing with Canvas using our GPU compute capability.



"In this video we take a look at using Fabric Canvas for image processing. Since the KL language that underlies Canvas has full GPU support, we experimented with a continuous GPU pipeline for image processing. All nodes in the video (except for the file loaders) are live (not cached). This allows for interactive framerates on HD full float composites.

Numbers on the test machine

I7-3770k @ 3.5 GHZ, 16GB RAM
NVidia K5000

Shot1:
CPU: 1.42 FPS
GPU: 8.15 FPS

Shot2:
CPU: 9.4 FPS
GPU: 36.0 FPS"

[Pooby]

Having done quite a lot of image manipulation, tracking etc in ICE, I find this avenue to explore in Fabric canvas very exciting indeed. In fact, I find the emergence of Fabric (canvas), more positive than I find the demise of Softimage negative.

This was some stuff I did a few years back https://vimeo.com/33588786

I wonder if it's possible that splice could write to a clip within XSI? Replacing the fx tree and allowing procedural generation/manipulation of images without resorting to writing to an image sequence?