Creation Platform - _deep_ integration to Softimage/Maya

[FabricPaul]

Hi guys – we’ve been keeping quiet about this so that Helge could present something new at the Softimage Ubertage event today. He should have just finished presenting, so I am happy to share this work publicly: http://fabricengine.com/creation/integrations/

This work allows us to integrate deeply with Maya and Softimage (and other C++ applications), doing cool things like procedural generation of geometry (grass and trees) and then rendering to Arnold – some videos:

Overview: https://vimeo.com/50165431
Case Study - Tree generator: https://vimeo.com/50233098
Case Study - Deformer: https://vimeo.com/50290984

We’re very excited by this work – a major goal for Fabric has been to enable portability of custom tools between DCC applications, and FEDG allows us to do that. This is just the first stage of this part of the project, so feedback and questions would be really helpful.

Thanks a lot,

Team Fabric

[Letterbox]

Love your work.

[Pooby]

So with this, we could develop platform-independant tools, yet that run in Soft or Maya (or standalone) using the same code, yet run much faster than either could run them.

This is the most amazing thing I've seen for years. Its truly revolutionary.
The concept of not going up in competition against any of the established apps, but working with them, helping them out from the inside and simultaneously beating them at their own game and offloading tasks, is just genius.

My money is on Fabric being the next big thing.

[TwinSnakes007]

Someone just asked me what FE is, and that's basically what I said too..it's a game changer.

...and to think that the investment in KL will pay off in spades because you can take advantage of the GPU as well. Imagine that SPH solver Guill just wrote running on the GPU, rendering to OpenGL in the SI viewport, and dumping the geo to file for offline rendering.

[FabricPaul]

We put together something a bit more interesting to watch

https://vimeo.com/groups/fabric/videos/50524350

[Letterbox]

if the last ones i loved, I cant say that for this one. I understand what one was trying to do, but I don't think it succeeded.

High performance? Then you lower the samples down to 1000, to move the grids vertex's, that to me is a negative, that technique is used when some companies know... you get the point. (I dont think thats your case)

If you were to do the same with the built in hair for grass (or ice, or Z* grass on here), you'd get the same functionality. So again I'm left wondering where's the a) hpc? and b) why grass?

As for Direct rendering, well MR direct renders the hair or strands, so again what's so special?

What makes me go OH Okay, I can really see the benefit of this...

As I said, I can see what your trying to do, but i don't think the video, is unique nor hpc enough VS. whats already achievable directly out of the box.

[FabricPaul]

I`m a bit confused - this video is just footage from the other videos cut together? Can you clarify what you mean?

[rray]

This has the potential to eat all 3d apps from the inside out.. scary stuff

Best of luck.. I hope this gets picked up from a lot of studios.

[Letterbox]

I`m a bit confused - this video is just footage from the other videos cut together? Can you clarify what you mean?

Lets assume you've never seen this video, nor heard of FE. Your putting material up that is achievable right out of the box - without - FE.

That's the only thing you can compare it to what you already have, and since it does that job already, ask - what is the Unique Selling Point of FE and how does this video exploit that. Because the video headings that you use you already have - Given the examples.

I'm saying is that last USP comment etc, is not there and your assuming that someone has seen all the others, what happens if they have not?

Even if they have, doesn't this video say to them, we're reworking what you have, I think FE is much more than that.

I hope that clears it up for you.

[FabricPaul]

Yes

btw - we made a new trailer: https://vimeo.com/groups/fabric/videos/46458060

[FabricPaul]

Yes

btw - we made a new trailer: https://vimeo.com/groups/fabric/videos/46458060

[Letterbox]

Yes

btw - we made a new trailer: https://vimeo.com/groups/fabric/videos/46458060

Another style of example in case it's not clear, Why is SI sold as a maya plug in?

Because you cant see it as a modeller, maya has that.
You cant sell it as animation, maya has that.
You cant sell it as rendering, maya has that.

So your left with the USP as a particle plugin. A great particle plugin, true, but a plugin none the less.

The items shown, grass, tree, is something I can already achieve, without FE. As I've commented, wheres the USP of FE?

[FabricPaul]

The USPs:
- performance
- customization capability
- portability

I'll try and explain with a metaphor:
My SUV can drive around a formula one track, and so can an F1 car. The experience in each is hugely different.

To extend further still:
I will give you the design for this F1 car, and all the tools so you can change the parts for it - you could build something completely different if you wanted. I'll even give you various parts to assemble other vehicles. Furthermore, you could even put the engine into one of the vehicles you already own - it won't be as fast as the complete F1, but it will make a difference. Even better - if you know a bit about mechanics, you'll be able to do a lot of this without needing an aerospace engineer to help you.

So - you might be able to create a procedural tree gen tool in ICE (or in any other DCC) - two questions:
1) can you take that exact same tool and run it in Maya?
2) how does your performance compare?

Not sure if the extended metaphor was helpful - too abstract? (it should also be noted that I know nothing about cars

[Letterbox]

The USPs:
- performance
- customization capability
- portability

I'll try and explain with a metaphor:
My SUV can drive around a formula one track, and so can an F1 car. The experience in each is hugely different.

To extend further still:
I will give you the design for this F1 car, and all the tools so you can change the parts for it - you could build something completely different if you wanted. I'll even give you various parts to assemble other vehicles. Furthermore, you could even put the engine into one of the vehicles you already own - it won't be as fast as the complete F1, but it will make a difference. Even better - if you know a bit about mechanics, you'll be able to do a lot of this without needing an aerospace engineer to help you.

So - you might be able to create a procedural tree gen tool in ICE (or in any other DCC) - two questions:
1) can you take that exact same tool and run it in Maya?
2) how does your performance compare?

Not sure if the extended metaphor was helpful - too abstract? (it should also be noted that I know nothing about cars

Thats great, just thats for me, and I already know this....

But since you NEVER know who's looking at your vimeo, if you dont ask, and answer the questions, you leave the viewer wondering. That gives them the ability to get the wrong impression.

Since its not going to be some artist, but some CEO/CTO/Manger that makes the purchasing call, the video begs the (unswered) question...

Why do I need to phone Paul and say I want FABRIC ENGINE right here, right NOW.

Capitalism at it's finest

[guillaume]

The items shown, grass, tree, is something I can already achieve, without FE. As I've commented, wheres the USP of FE?

Hello Letterbox,

I totally understand your point, and I think this is the normal behaviour to compare a new app to existing ones. The big difference here is that you should not compare . Creation Platform is not a new DCC. It is a platform to build tools. The tree or grass demos are just examples to demonstrate the big advantage of using this application. You can build fast tools ... faster and you can use them in Softimage, Maya or Arnold (for now). And by the way, I'm not sure that you can already achieve grass or tree like in the demo using vanilla Softimage or Maya ;).

Here is my attempt to describe Fabric Engine Creation Platform. (I already post it on a the arnold beta list this weekend so sorry for the double post, but I think it will help you get a better picture !

Fabric Engine is a platform to build custom applications. Using this platform you've got access to high performance computing from a dynamic languages like Python or Jscript.
You can construct a Fabric Engine dependency graph who is defining your application nodes and their connexions / dependencies.
To simplify, a node is an object where you can define your data (like your points positions) and your methods (like a deformer). This node can have some dependencies with other nodes (some inputs for example) and so will evaluate those dependencies first if needed. The nice thing with this dependency graph, is that it can run several graphs in parallel (if they are not dependent on each other). In this case Fabric do a "task-based" parallelism. In addition Fabric can evaluate an operator in parallel if the you've got more than one element processed by this operator (like the points positions for a deformer). In this case Fabric achieves a "data-based" or “SIMD” parallelism. Finally, those parallelism can be run on different architectures and kinds of hardware, specifically CPUs and GPUs as we are using KL.

KL is a language designed to run performance-critical sections of dynamic-language programs. As such, programs run as quickly as possible on modern hardware. KL syntax is similar to Jscript / C so it is very easy to learn if you already know one of those languages.

Creation Platform is the python interface to build those dependency graph in your application. So it let you define, create/delete and connect those nodes.
But Creation platform is more than that. It gives you all the common tools needed by a 3d application, like a 3D viewport for our openGL renderer, an Undo/Redo system, a persistence system, manipulators, a timeline, some parsers nodes to imports Alembic, or FBX or Lidar files for example.

You can add any C or C++ library to Creation Platform using the Extension system. This system let you access those libraries directly from the KL language.

Finally, with the new CAPI, you can now run the Fabric Engine Dependency Graph from your C++ or C application like Arnold, Softimage or Maya and use FEDG, our new portable description format to save those dependency graph's.

I'm sure there are a lot of things I forgot to mention, but I hope it will help you to get a better picture on what is Fabric Engine.

I hope it mak sense,

Cheers

[FabricPaul]

Ah ok, now I understand - it's a comment on the message the video gives, rather than your understanding. I was confused We will keep working on messaging - we need something snappier for the CAPI page. Hopefully it's enough to maintain attention so that people will dig deeper.

p.s. don't get me started on 'Softimage is a particle system'.