Guest tar Posted July 18, 2013 Share Posted July 18, 2013 Fabric Engine looks amazing and it's always healthy to have great competition. Looking forward to the next round of FE vs X-software joust! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pazuzu Posted July 18, 2013 Share Posted July 18, 2013 Definitely. Riggin is an area where Houdini is needed of much development and F.E might find a lot of interest there from studios with Houdini in their pipelines. You screwed, but the correction was as elegant as the screw up. Thumps up!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt_K Posted July 20, 2013 Share Posted July 20, 2013 Hi all! We have tested some of the FabricEngine stuff and it is really impressive. It's a very smart and passionate bunch of guys working there. I do agree that the comparison they chose was really short sighted and not properly thought through, but I also think they are doing some amazing work. I look forward to seeing how our tools improve in leaps and bounds with some healthy competition (as far as 'Engines' are concerned) and with the likes of SESI and FabricEngine pushing the limits of what our current technology is capable of I think we're in for some exciting times! And let's face it - there's no real threat to Houdini at present. Just a few thoughts on this matter, Matt. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abvfx Posted December 20, 2013 Author Share Posted December 20, 2013 You can now sign up to test it out. http://fabricengine.com/get-fabric/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Posted August 11, 2014 Share Posted August 11, 2014 I think with MPC and other customer's investment and their evidently very committed team, FabricEngine will succeed. Many Maya-centric places are champing at the bit to improve their workflow, and I can see FabricEngine in Houdini being a vital link in the chain and necessary to take a pipeline to the next level. FX is further down the production pipeline and it'd be great to load rigged Maya assets into Houdini. We should definitely be embracing FabricEngine into Houdini. However, while it'd be great fun for Houdini people get HoudiniEngine to 100% saturation into the rest of the pipeline, the day when Houdini usurps rigging and animation is a very long way off. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FabricPaul Posted August 17, 2014 Share Posted August 17, 2014 hi guys - long time no speak. I just got a google alert on this thread so i thought it would be good to give you an update. If you're interested to see what we were presenting this year, you can see the user group videos here: http://fabricengine.com/2014/08/fabric-at-siggraph-2014/ We are going to start a closed beta of Splice into Houdini in the next month or two. I will post the sign up information in here once we're ready to go. Fabric is a platform, so it's imperative that we work well with Houdini - our customers aren't interested in anything apart from 'does it all work together?'. The days of single application pipelines are long gone, and things like Fabric, Houdini Engine and (perhaps) Bifrost extend that notion further. Portable tools, portable assets, portable processing. It's all quite exciting Anyway - I hope to see some of you guys joining the beta and giving us some guidance. Cheers, Paul 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted August 17, 2014 Share Posted August 17, 2014 Sounds great Paul. Not all customers care for 'does it all work together' but for performance Thanks again for producing killer-game changing tech! Fabric is a platform, so it's imperative that we work well with Houdini - our customers aren't interested in anything apart from 'does it all work together?'. The days of single application pipelines are long gone, and things like Fabric, Houdini Engine and (perhaps) Bifrost extend that notion further. Portable tools, portable assets, portable processing. It's all quite exciting Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pazuzu Posted August 18, 2014 Share Posted August 18, 2014 (edited) Thanks for the great news Paul, It'll very nice to participate in the closed beta!! Edited August 18, 2014 by Pazuzu Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Posted August 18, 2014 Share Posted August 18, 2014 Thanks Paul, I am definitely interested to see what can be done. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stevegh Posted August 18, 2014 Share Posted August 18, 2014 I think Fabric Engine shows HUGE promise but I cannot tell if I should be investing time into learning yet another system. Everyone seems to be pushing the software agnostic pipeline approach now, and both SESI and FE have a good head start. Would love to take part in the closed beta. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pelos Posted August 21, 2014 Share Posted August 21, 2014 dont forget that fabric compliles the pluging to use it in other 3d softwares, while houdini engine, opens a copy of houdini in the back. so you are comparing a compile pluging that run the instructions vs reading each node and passing the information on each node. like saying C++ is faster than python. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FabricPaul Posted August 24, 2014 Share Posted August 24, 2014 Maybe I've misunderstood what you wrote, but I think you're confusing the Splice plugin (which is compiled) with Fabric Engine. Splice is just how FE is exposed within any other DCC. Fabric is running as normal inside the host DCC, You do not pre-compile Fabric applications, that's the whole point of using LLVM. You author KL 'live' and then dynamically compile on target. The entire premise of Fabric is 'we want TDs to get the performance of C++/CUDA, but with the ease of use and iteration of Python". In 2.0 you'll be able to author KL through the new visual programming system. You can see the new data flow graph and visual programming in FE2.0 in some of these Siggraph presentations: http://fabricengine.com/2014/08/fabric-at-siggraph-2014/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FabricPaul Posted October 11, 2014 Share Posted October 11, 2014 Hi guys - normally I wouldn't post in here for a release notice, but since we're working on the Houdini integration at the moment I wanted to give you a heads up. In particular, there's a new standalone C++ framework for running Fabric (and a Python version to follow soon) - so if you want to dip into Fabric without running another DCC application there is now a viable path to do so. I'm hoping we'll open the Houdini beta by the end of the year and I'll post here as soon as we're ready. The full release info is here Some highlights: KL inheritance, OS X support and enhancements to GPU Compute for KL. We've started moving certain parts of Fabric to public repos (things like the Alembic extension, Vicon support etc) so you can take what we've done and run with it. Finally, we've overhauled our docs so you should find it much easier to get the information you need. As always, Fabric is free for individuals (and we've removed the licensing step to make it even easier for you to get up and running). We also offer fifty free licenses to studios - the 'just a taste' business model You can get Fabric here Thanks, Paul Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
el_diablo Posted October 12, 2014 Share Posted October 12, 2014 Looking good, Houdini+Fabric should be a formidable combo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FabricPaul Posted March 14, 2015 Share Posted March 14, 2015 Hi guys - just in case you had missed it, we recently announced the testing program for Fabric 2.0 and Canvas (our visual programming system). http://fabricengine.com/canvas/ Houdini integration is in the works but you can kick the standalone around in the meantime Hope to see some of you guys sign up: http://fabricengine.com/canvas-testing-program/ Cheers, Paul Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gui Posted March 14, 2015 Share Posted March 14, 2015 Hi guys - just in case you had missed it, we recently announced the testing program for Fabric 2.0 and Canvas (our visual programming system). http://fabricengine.com/canvas/ Houdini integration is in the works but you can kick the standalone around in the meantime Hope to see some of you guys sign up: http://fabricengine.com/canvas-testing-program/ Cheers, Paul Thanks Paul. Since in houdini we have vex and python very accessible, and our canvas, vops, can you list some of the main advantages for us, to learn another programming language? I know fabric is very fast, but vex is multithreaded too... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FabricPaul Posted March 14, 2015 Share Posted March 14, 2015 I think you guys will have to do a certain amount of discovery of where/when Fabric is going to be of value. From my perspective I'd suggest looking at the following: 1) breadth: Fabric is a general compute platform, so we can go after a lot of different problems. A demo we just shipped was for 2D processing: https://vimeo.com/122130309 2) extensibility: Fabric can be extended to support other software and hardware very easily. We have a tool for wrapping existing libraries (KL2EDK) that is pretty powerful - we did some stuff with VR last year that you might like: http://fabricengine.com/virtual-reality/ 3) which in turn leads to another tool (KL2DFG) which goes through existing KL code to create a preset library. In combination this means you can take a library and create a visual programming interface for it extremely easily: https://vimeo.com/121492304 4) Fabric's standalone - this is what we used in the 2D image processing video. There are many cases where you might want to build a very simple tool (asset viewers, playback tools etc) and the C++ framework is good for that. We'll introduce a Python standalone as well later this year that should make that path viable for TDs that don't like digging into C++. I won't get into comparative performance as that created problems in the past I will say that the transparent GPU compilation shown in the 2D video is a general capability of Fabric - so any KL code you write can leverage the GPU (bunch of caveats here but too techie to get into). We're really pushing hard on rig performance and this GPU compute capability is going to take it even further - DNeg did a nice customer story on their use of FE: http://fabricengine.com/double-negative-customer-story/ There are some other things coming for Canvas that are very powerful. If you're interested in that side of things then I recommend watching the first presentation here: http://fabricengine.com/canvas-for-rd/ There are a fair few Houdini users that want to have FE available to them alongside Houdini - over time I'll learn more about why. I think the days of single-tool pipelines are long gone, and the benefit of things like Fabric Engine and Houdini Engine is we're working to make mixed pipelines a much less painful world. I hope that helps. Cheers, Paul 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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