Creation: Horde and Softimage

News concerning 3D DCC business
FabricPaul
Posts: 188
Joined: 21 Mar 2012, 15:17

Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by FabricPaul » 01 May 2013, 03:43

Hi guys – I've held off posting any updates on Horde as I knew we had a sweet Softimage/ICE integration in the pipe. The nice thing with our locomotion system is that it lends itself well to closer shots when you're working with a few characters - and combined with ICE that makes for some really interesting options. Helge has only scratched the surface with this, but already you can see just how awesome the combination is.

1) Reel: https://vimeo.com/61358674

2) Maya integration info: http://fabricengine.com/creation-modules/inside-maya/

3) Softimage integration: http://fabricengine.com/creation-module ... softimage/

4) Main page: http://fabricengine.com/creation-modules/horde/

We're currently in closed alpha/beta - if you're a commercial studio and you'd like to help with the testing program, please drop me a line.

Cheers,

Paul

Lord Futzi Voldemort
Posts: 440
Joined: 06 Jun 2009, 14:01
Contact:

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by Lord Futzi Voldemort » 01 May 2013, 13:22

That is so cool.
It also shows all the main areas where Autodesk failed. This will send Crowd FX down the same path that Behavior went. If you want to do serious crowd stuff, you go with massive or - in the future - horde. If you just want to populate am architectural scene, you'd go with anima, because for archviz crowd fx is still to tedious to setup, and for serious stuff - well, the video speaks for itself. So investing development in crowd fx was a fail. It was good as an ICE tech demo, and for very few people who have the time to dive into it. Also it seems, that almost everybody can program a viewport renderer, except, sorry to say that, the softimage team. So this proves again: every valuable contribution for softimage doesn't come from autodesk.
And every marketing decision in terms of application development was just wrong.
I'm now part of an endangered species...

Leo
Posts: 128
Joined: 04 Jun 2009, 17:06

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by Leo » 01 May 2013, 13:29

That looks fantastic.

I really like the paint interface.

Bellsey
Posts: 688
Joined: 19 Apr 2010, 11:50
Location: London, UnitedKingdom
Contact:

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by Bellsey » 01 May 2013, 16:50

Lord Futzi Voldemort wrote:That is so cool.
It also shows all the main areas where Autodesk failed. This will send Crowd FX down the same path that Behavior went. If you want to do serious crowd stuff, you go with massive or - in the future - horde. If you just want to populate am architectural scene, you'd go with anima, because for archviz crowd fx is still to tedious to setup, and for serious stuff - well, the video speaks for itself. So investing development in crowd fx was a fail. It was good as an ICE tech demo, and for very few people who have the time to dive into it. Also it seems, that almost everybody can program a viewport renderer, except, sorry to say that, the softimage team. So this proves again: every valuable contribution for softimage doesn't come from autodesk.
And every marketing decision in terms of application development was just wrong.
ok, I get it, you hate our guts. lol
But do you have any constructive views for Paul about Horde? I'm sure the Fabric guys would welcome any feedback or queries, instead of just bashing us.
If you want to stick the boot in, which I really don't mind, perhaps do it in another thead, eh?

Just saying....

User avatar
Hirazi Blue
Administrator
Posts: 5107
Joined: 04 Jun 2009, 12:15

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by Hirazi Blue » 01 May 2013, 16:59

@Bellsey - You have every right to take (some) offense at Lord Futzi Voldemorts remarks, but don't step into the shoes of the Moderators/Administrator by directing him to some other thread.
That's the job of our team, if we ever get to it. ;)

And besides that, I do not think the remarks were all that off topic. Considering the employment history of many @Fabric they're probably thrilled to hear how people think they're doing stuff better than Autodesk. And FabricPaul has stated he'd like to see the real discussions on their own mailing list, which leaves us with comments like Lord Futzi Voldemort, I guess.
:D

edit: forgot to add the second smilie...
Stay safe, sane & healthy!

Bellsey
Posts: 688
Joined: 19 Apr 2010, 11:50
Location: London, UnitedKingdom
Contact:

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by Bellsey » 01 May 2013, 17:17

I wasn't trying to step into anyone's shoes, just merely making an observation.

FabricPaul
Posts: 188
Joined: 21 Mar 2012, 15:17

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by FabricPaul » 01 May 2013, 17:42

I actually have a lot of friends at AD (including Bellsey), so I'm not a fan of bashing them for doing their jobs. Obviously we felt we could do some things better, otherwise we wouldn't have started Fabric :)

We had the benefit of a completely clean start point for our framework; we didn't have the legacy headaches that you have from a 10+ year old product, but we'll get them eventually. We also don't have a huge subscription-base that we have to keep happy with yearly releases (we try and release more frequently and when we're ready - not something you can easily do when you're a big company). We're a small company so it's easy for us to make decisions quickly and then act on them - when you have layers of management to get through, and product plans that are approved about a year ahead of release, it's very hard to make rapid changes.

I think CrowdFX got screwed over by Guillaume being moved off of it onto other things, otherwise I think he would have continued to develop it into a really nice tool.

As for the real-time rendering - that's about a year of work from Jerome, built on top of a core engine that's three years of work for the whole team. It's not a trivial investment to build something like that.

Also - I'm happy to discuss the products we make here, I just want to make sure that technical stuff gets handled on the Creation list.

User avatar
Hirazi Blue
Administrator
Posts: 5107
Joined: 04 Jun 2009, 12:15

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by Hirazi Blue » 01 May 2013, 17:59

Come on, lighten up a little. My "explanations" in the second paragraph were slightly "tongue in cheek", but I stand by my opinion (as an Administrator here, might I add) that Lord Futzi Voldemort wasn't really off topic while Bellsey felt the need to express he thought he was.
Stay safe, sane & healthy!

FabricPaul
Posts: 188
Joined: 21 Mar 2012, 15:17

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by FabricPaul » 01 May 2013, 18:34

I was just making sure I wasn't getting drawn into it through silence :)

Letterbox
Posts: 391
Joined: 17 Jun 2009, 14:49

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by Letterbox » 01 May 2013, 18:38

Paul,

I'd like to see more about the locomotion, and the changes of states, in an ice context and how one creates and manufactures them to be compatible. Further, like Guillaume recent postings on Vimeo, the scalability of it, not just on an i7, but a server system.

With respect to the rendering, and texturing, I'd also like to see something regarding changes of characters textures, while retaining the motion(s). While knowing what renderers it supports out of the box.

I know the obvious comparison is with CFX, I'd be interested to hear your point of view of where it differs in functionality / design and any respective benefits.

Thank you.

FabricPaul
Posts: 188
Joined: 21 Mar 2012, 15:17

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by FabricPaul » 01 May 2013, 19:23

You may find some of the videos on the main Horde pages cover what you're after - did you watch all of those already? http://fabricengine.com/creation-modules/horde/

The main benefits of the system (or things that I like about it):
- most critically, it's built on top of Creation Platform. This means the performance is exceptional and will only improve (particularly when we start running on HSA architectures later this year). This also means that if you have a 16 core system then we would expect Horde to take advantage of it.
- it's real-time and interactive, without compromising on character complexity. Running crowds with muscles, cloth and hair solvers isn't so interesting when you're working with hundreds of thousands of agents - but when you're working with smaller crowds it can make a real difference.
- the Horde animation system is good enough that it can be used for previz and virtual production. It just so happens that we can scale to thousands of extras with the same system. For huge crowds (50,000 and much higher) we will need to implement some workflows that aren't just brute force. We'll develop those with our testing group as they continue to work with us.
- the ability to bring in pretty much any rig type (humanoid, non-humanoid, insects, quads etc etc) and have it in your scene in such a short time period is pretty awesome.
- the semi-procedural nature of the locomotion system. Pure proceduralism looks crappy, so taking hand animation (or mocap) and using that as the basis of the procedural animation makes things look a lot nicer. Having the inventor of CAT as a co-founder helps a lot when it comes to rigging and animation approaches :)
- The real-time part means that we can work with a workflow based around direction rather than AI behavior, which allows for a high-iteration process with instantaneous change. The paint-based system is great for large groups, but the null-based controls are needed for the smaller groups.
- it's using our real-time rendering, which is pretty awesome. The castle scene used in the demo takes something like 7 minutes to load in Maya (I think Softimage couldn't load the full scene), we can load it in 2.5 seconds. We haven't shown any of the recent work that Jerome is doing, but the pass system is very powerful - you're going to be able to make things look really good.

If I was going to distill everything to a core idea, it's this: once you have the performance to run this kind of system in real-time, you start to see that traditional AI workflows don't make sense. Real-time means you can be interactive, so the workflow should evolve to reflect that. Why should I try and debug the AI behavior on a character when I just want to select him and tell him what to do? There are places where AI is needed, but outright direction covers many scenarios nicely.

Regarding textures, and your locomotion question I'll get Phil or Helge to cover it. They can correct any errors I've made :)

As for rendering - right now it's through alembic export. We will probably implement Arnold stand-ins soon (similar to what we did in Flora), but we're waiting to hear from customers first - often they want to bring the geometry back to Maya or Soft rather than go straight to render...

laluneverte
Posts: 12
Joined: 25 Feb 2011, 10:32

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by laluneverte » 01 May 2013, 21:41

Letterbox wrote:Paul,

I'd like to see more about the locomotion, and the changes of states, in an ice context and how one creates and manufactures them to be compatible. Further, like Guillaume recent postings on Vimeo, the scalability of it, not just on an i7, but a server system.

With respect to the rendering, and texturing, I'd also like to see something regarding changes of characters textures, while retaining the motion(s). While knowing what renderers it supports out of the box.

I know the obvious comparison is with CFX, I'd be interested to hear your point of view of where it differs in functionality / design and any respective benefits.

Thank you.
Hey Letterbox,

thanks for you interest in Creation:Horde. Feel free to request early access through our website for your company to evaluate Creation:Horde within Softimage.

Concerning your questions: Rigging and character setup is covered in previous videos, you can find all of them on our vimeo channel. Characters are essentially exported as a plain FK rig through FBX, and then rigged and setup for Creation:Horde in our rigging tool. I personally don't have access to a server system, on my machine I can run up to 2500 agents with around 25fps inside Maya or Softimage, depending on the complexity of the skinned geometry. Again - feel free to request early access to you can evaluate on your reference machines. Creation:Horde ships with sample characters so you can evaluate performance without having to dig into rigging in the beginning. UVs are maintained, for an initial release of our procedural shaders we'll support Arnold. Also you (as covered in our videos) you can export to Alembic and therefore assign textures and shaders the way you desire.

Benefits over CFX: Scalability, performance, flexibility, deep renderer integration, cross DCC functionality as well as standalone tools, advanced realtime rendering etc. Most of these benefits apply to any tool built with Creation Platform.

I hope this helps,

Helge
Helge Mathee - Software Engineer - Fabric Engine

luceric
Posts: 1251
Joined: 22 Jun 2009, 00:08

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by luceric » 01 May 2013, 21:47

great demoes Helge! thanks for including Softimage.

laluneverte
Posts: 12
Joined: 25 Feb 2011, 10:32

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by laluneverte » 01 May 2013, 21:52

luceric wrote:great demoes Helge! thanks for including Softimage.
Thanks, Luc Eric.

Softimage has quite an advantage over maya, since all of the math and geometry logic required for crowds is already provided through ICE. Also, due to history, I always enjoy integrating into ICE. :)
Helge Mathee - Software Engineer - Fabric Engine

Lord Futzi Voldemort
Posts: 440
Joined: 06 Jun 2009, 14:01
Contact:

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by Lord Futzi Voldemort » 01 May 2013, 22:38

Bellsey wrote:
Lord Futzi Voldemort wrote:That is so cool.
It also shows all the main areas where Autodesk failed. This will send Crowd FX down the same path that Behavior went. If you want to do serious crowd stuff, you go with massive or - in the future - horde. If you just want to populate am architectural scene, you'd go with anima, because for archviz crowd fx is still to tedious to setup, and for serious stuff - well, the video speaks for itself. So investing development in crowd fx was a fail. It was good as an ICE tech demo, and for very few people who have the time to dive into it. Also it seems, that almost everybody can program a viewport renderer, except, sorry to say that, the softimage team. So this proves again: every valuable contribution for softimage doesn't come from autodesk.
And every marketing decision in terms of application development was just wrong.
ok, I get it, you hate our guts. lol
But do you have any constructive views for Paul about Horde? I'm sure the Fabric guys would welcome any feedback or queries, instead of just bashing us.
If you want to stick the boot in, which I really don't mind, perhaps do it in another thead, eh?

Just saying....
No I don't hate you. When I'm talking about Autodesk, I'm not talking about the Softimage or maya developer team. I'm talking about the "institution". I rather feel sorry for all you guys who give your best, but for the wrong company - or people who make the wrong decisions. What you can achieve making the right decisions is what you see in the fabric engine demos, because I don't think there is a lack of skill at the softimage team, but a lack of plan, and that is not their fault. Nothing would stop Autodesk from developing it's own original technologies, except the will to spend the budget, and that is determined by "the institution". That is what I meant in another thread with building competence. All that will be left for AD in the future is buy tech in call it a new feature. You can't win that way, and believe me I'd rather see the tool I've invested so much money for myself thrive and prosper, so I'm actually on your side.
By saying the fabricengine frame work is one of the most valuable contributions to the whoöe cg world, and it is again nothing that comes from autodesk, I'm actually commenting directly the presentation that was the topic of this thread.
I'm now part of an endangered species...

Letterbox
Posts: 391
Joined: 17 Jun 2009, 14:49

Re: Creation: Horde and Softimage

Post by Letterbox » 02 May 2013, 01:25

LFV, don't get me wrong, I'm with you in hammering Autodesk (the corp, not the people, I understand your differentiation), when/if they deserve it, and they often do, but please, not every single thread. Two reasons, a) It gets tiresome. b) it looses it's impact, when you do go ballistic.

As to do so in this thread I feel is misplaced choice, for one is forgetting the solace gained from developers like Paul, Helge and the rest of the team at Fabric-Engine, who are actively supporting Softimage.

Considering it's not the biggest market, and therefore less in revenues, it was and IS a brave choice on Fabric-Engine's part to develop for SI. That choice allows great artists to still create great works using their toolset(s) and the dcc of the artists choice. You have to respect that call by the team at Fabric-Engine. And dragging AD into this thread dilutes that, and I know you LFV obviously value that call too, even in moments of frustration.

As for Paul's and Helge's comments to my questions, what I'm particularly glad to hear is that they are thinking of HSA & HPC now, and that gives us even in these very early & preliminary questions, the knowledge that an alternative choice to the 'usual suspects' exists, and is being actively developed. That's welcome news.

Which, LVF, I'm sure you see that too, and it's exactly what I'm talking about. Choice.

Thanks to both Paul and Helge for both your very complete answers in these early days. Appreciated.

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Amazon [Bot] and 45 guests