Splice for Softimage is here

[FabricPaul]

Hi everyone – we’ve been pushing along on Splice, and will be making the first drop of Splice for Softimage to our closed testing group next week. I thought you’d appreciate a look at what we’ve done.



This video gives a detailed introduction into Creation:Splice inside of Softimage and its concepts. In the video Creation:Splice is used to build a custom rig solver, design it inside of Softimage, re-use it within Softimage and finally loading it inside of Maya as well.



This video shows how to build procedural geometry using Splice within Softimage. Splice is used to build a custom polygonmesh cloning functionality, which is designed inside of Softimage, and then used within Maya.



This video shows two additional samples. The first one shows a custom simulation rig functionality to perform a verlet simulation for a rope like effect, both used within Softimage and Maya. The second sample is a procedural geometry generator cloning a mesh onto a surface, which is as well used within Softimage and Maya to showcase the portability of Splice.

Let us know what you think – if you’d like to join the Splice testing group, please email beta@fabricengine.com with a bit of information about your skillset and background. Splice is targeted at TDs that can write Python, so please keep that in mind – this is not an end-user tool.

Thanks a lot,

Paul

[iamVFX]

HOLY SH

[FabricPaul]

p.s. this is what people had to say about Splice at Siggraph:

[telepatam]

Thank you so much for doing this and supporting softimage. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that
this gives hope for the future to softimage users who have put time, money and passion into learning the software
and who still prefer its elegance and workflow over the other available alternatives out there.

Hopefully this tech will keep softimage a viable option as a tool of choice for years to come or dare I say possibly
even make all the overly passionate and sometimes warmongering software users friendlier to each other with all of them running the same fabric tech
Ushering an unprecedented age of peace between the zealous 3d users of all tastes.

As a critique, is there any way this could be controlled from an ice graph, visually?
The maya version has a nice graph editor to go with it, that seems really useful.

[Bullit]

Yes that is my question too. ICE makes us addicts of nodes.

[FabricPaul]

This came up on the XSI mailing list already. Helge's response:

The real issue here is performance. ICE by itself is fast, our core is fast by itself as well. Now to integrate our core into ICE is kind of difficult, essentially due to competition of greedy schedulers. We can of course do that by adding a single threaded node inside of ICE, but that kind of defeats the purpose. The lack of flexibility for procedurally created ports within an ICE node also makes it very hard to integrate there.

Of course you can build ICE nodes for specific purposes. For Horde for example we've integrated in there, but the data streamed is trivial (1000 matrices etc). Once you get into millions of particles the performance will drop.

I don't think it's required at all to integrate the Splice system into the ICE graph, since at that point portability won't work anyway.

As for the graph tool, that's something Maya provides.

[laluneverte]

Splice doesn't have a graph that comes with it in Maya, it's Maya which has an overall editable Scene Graph - the Hypergraph.

ICE is limited to a given scope within Softimage, where it excels. We don't see a need to integrate Splice into ICE, because of several reasons.

a) ICE is doing extremely well in terms of performance.
b) ICE's SDK is very limited in describing procedural UI and procedural parameters for nodes, the standard Operator SDK is not.
c) ICE's threading is efficient and distributes across nodes. We would have to stop ICE's threading when we go into a Splice node, perform our own threading, and finally hand that back to ICE to perform threading. It would essentially make the ICE graph single threaded, and therefore there would be a loss in performance overall. That doesn't make sense.
d) Integrating into ICE defeats the purpose of portability somewhat. Splice isn't only a feature in Softimage, it's a path out of Softimage as well. That's a very important functionality, and much easier to turn around when looking at the operator scope only.

I'll be presenting Splice for Softimage at the Softimage Uebertage this year,
feel free to come by to ask more questions in person!

http://www.softimage-uebertage.de//page ... hp?lang=EN

I hope this helps.

[Bullit]

What about native nodes for Splice?


For someone that is not a TD but saw the power that ICE gives and is not afraid to learn what would be the steps get into Splice even if that means loosing the nodes elegance ? Python was already noted, anything else?

[laluneverte]

Hey Bullit,

we are looking into visual programming (aka nodes) for providing a different IDE for KL. This means that instead of writing code you will be able to put together nodes to express the logic. Currently that's not possible though. The idea is that we are not trying to build a node editor to create runtime graphs (like ICE), but use it to create code. This means that the result will be the same as if a TD would sit down and write it up, and the code can be extended with features of the language which are simply not possible to express in a graph, recursions, for example.

I hope this helps,

-H

[Bullit]

Thanks. Can you show/explain a case of a recursion that is impossible to express with a graph?

[xsisupport]

Can you show/explain a case of a recursion that is impossible to express with a graph?

I think the question is: can you think of any recursion that can be represented in a visual programming graph?

[Bullit]

I am afraid i don't know much about recursions, i have read about recursions in this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion_(computer_science) but lot of it is too much for my state of learning. Some of examples appear to work with an "and" node but others i couldn't even state the problem.

[gustavoeb]

here is a bit of info on recursions then...
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-e ... lecture-4/

[Bullit]

Thanks.

[laluneverte]

just so you know, 1.0.3-beta of Creation: Splice, which includes the Softimage plugin, is available today.
If you haven't signed up for beta yet go ahead.

beta@fabricengine.com

State your name, company etc...

[Letterbox]

Can you show/explain a case of a recursion that is impossible to express with a graph?

I think the question is: can you think of any recursion that can be represented in a visual programming graph?

It's not that it can't be done, but ICE won't let you connect ports that way - it says "Cyclic connection in ICE TREE" - and refuses to play - so in this case it's a bit moot. But either way, typing code is good for the soul, because you get to the soul of the machine, or at least soul of Splice.

KL is not that hard - it has a self similarity to many other languages - so if you know one language - it should easy'ish to be up and running in KL in very little time. see http://documentation.fabric-engine.com/ ... intro.html