www.si-community.com

To say that I think a Fabric forum is a smashing idea.

I suspect it won't really get much traction until fabric 2.0 and it's visual programming is released, as that is what I feel is going to wake most people up to the possibilities it offers.

This also is quite interesting https://vimeo.com/113311823

I hope it's not just wishful thinking to imagine there is a small trend going on here.

I am very curious on how this product is financially viable. It is mostly going to be used for technical purposes, so it is not like everybody can use it, on top of that they are giving away a boat-load of free copies to each company. I mean no disrespect at all I am just trying to understand it. Also, if a person actually made a 3rd party application with it could they sell, we haven't seen anything yet.

I'm afraid that, despite the 'open' structure of these frameworks, a lot of development based on FE (or something like FlowBox for that matter) will stay in-house.
It's like the R&H Voodoo tools, at some point on the horizon as a new breed of commercial production tools, but never 'got there'.

Also, a lot of development will be catered to a certain workflow and company structure, so selling it will make not a lot of sense for many. Or adapt to the software.

FE, which is out for quite a while now, hasn't provided us with people/studio created ICE like tools for sharing and/or testing so far. Or I'm looking in the wrong places.
Maybe that is/was mostly due to the text driven development, and the 2.0 version will change that.

It will be interesting to see how this evolves, and how much of the hard work will be shared at some point for people to use.
Or when commercial tools show up, like e.g. FE versions of the Mootz tools for instance.
That would basically mean a 'universal plugin', like the apps in Win10. One app to rule them all.... ;-P

So far, when looking at 'easy' data travel between apps, the Houdini Engine/Assets might be the only 'logical' alternative at the moment. Although that's not really the same thing, and a more expensive road taken as well ;-)

My first ramblings for 2015, and wishing everybody a great year. With great opportunities and most importantly - good health-

Rob

Personally I still struggle with the question if I should buckle down and learn this.
The prefab stuff is impressive and it's rather obvious that it's a very powerful tool,
somehow, however, I do not see how it would fit in my personal hobbyist bubble (yet?).

When I first came to Xsi from lightwave, I was shocked at the small amount of plugins available for it.
(I soon realised that it didn't need them in the same way but that's a separate issue)
However, if you look post Ice, there are a huge amount of tools shared in the soft image community. The reason being that ice is fun to experiment in, whereas coding less so. It took quite a while after ices release for people to get it.

I am sure the same will happen with fabric. At the moment it seems (and is) for very techy people, but as it becomes more intuitive to use, it will gather more momentum. Plus I believe there will be at some point, a central place where tools can be shared.


At the moment starting with Fabric seems quite impenetrable and fabrics video demos are pretty dry and aimed above your average technical artist.
It also takes people to find inspiration through beginners fun tutorials that lead them in. This is what I intend to make this next year.

Pooby wrote:When I first came to Xsi from lightwave, I was shocked at the small amount of plugins available for it.
(I soon realised that it didn't need them in the same way but that's a separate issue)
However, if you look post Ice, there are a huge amount of tools shared in the soft image community. The reason being that ice is fun to experiment in, whereas coding less so. It took quite a while after ices release for people to get it.

Well, advocatus diaboli would say say.. they had no choice, hehe... First of all, Softimage had no other choice to help the production of addons, so they created the system, enough easy to promote the ambitious artists into rank of TD. Artists had no other choice too, they had to play by more complicated rules. Or exactly, they had choice to leave the board, and some of them did. But all that was product of somehow extraordinary state of Softimage, small user base and so on. In 'regular' times, that is, huge user base of Maya, Max or others, there is more than enough of trained professionals to hold the area of addons, experiments with vector math, whatever. Artist could experiment with something else, let's say, to try all available path tracers all around..

Anyway interesting aspect of 'engine concept', I think it is possibility to develop the addons in 'discount shop' style, or let's call it, ICE style. Once there is a central engine, should be possible to offer the simplified variance of particular addon for Max, 50% percent of features for 20% price, or like. I intentionally mentioned Max, only, as Maya field seems to be already covered by affordable addons. Enough good Maya SDK, perhaps.

In any case, I can't imagine why developers of Houdini or Fabric, should be motivated to go into hard work of making the system with no need to code at all - when already there are human forces who can live without such approach, and they don't see advantage at all - it's more an offence for them, I think.

Yet another aspect is flexibility of nodal approach, but this could be done for particular system in any 3d app, no need for engine.

I'm hoping fabric won't be just a tool development platform for people to use together with maya. It would be great if it could also be used for scene assembly and lighting together with the render engine of your choice be it corona render or redshift or something else.
The stage module looked very impressive for that purpose.

As someone who works a lot with zbrush exporting and importing heavy geometry from zbrush can be kinda tedious and wastes a lot of time, it would be great if there was an app that could handle that much geometry with ease. Sort of like what the new Keyshot bridge to zbrush is attempting to do, but not as limited because I don't think Keyshot is an ideal solution for putting together huge complex scenes or even mildly complex scenes.

Nice to see this sub forum here. Lets hope it becomes a good place to share information (I've never liked mailing lists). I think I read somewhere that the release of Fabric Engine 2.0 is planned for this month. My fingers are crossed.

I am very curious on how this product is financially viable. It is mostly going to be used for technical purposes, so it is not like everybody can use it, on top of that they are giving away a boat-load of free copies to each company. I mean no disrespect at all I am just trying to understand it. Also, if a person actually made a 3rd party application with it could they sell, we haven't seen anything yet.

1) We're a small company with some big customers, so we do ok
2) The free copies disappear quite fast once you start using Fabric on the render farm (and the Fabric 50 split between render licenses and interactive licenses will be formalised soon - we couldn't do it before due to licensing limitations. It will probably shift to something like 20/80 and we'll stop calling it Fabric50 . Plus if you're using Fabric in production you are more than likely going to want proper support as well as options to safeguard your pipeline if you're building on a commercial platform like Fabric.
3) We have a 3rd party licensing program that will be announced this month. There are a few technical requirements that we have to get in place (the main one is being able to protect your code).

I'm hoping fabric won't be just a tool development platform for people to use together with maya. It would be great if it could also be used for scene assembly and lighting together with the render engine of your choice be it corona render or redshift or something else.
The stage module looked very impressive for that purpose.

I'm not sure if you've seen the talks we gave at Siggraph: http://fabricengine.com/user-group-videos/ - Session 7 gives you an idea of our thinking. Scene Assembly is our primary scenario for the development of FE2.0. We'll start releasing more information on this over the next month or two.

You can view Stage as a prototype that showed us we really had to re-architect the scenegraph to be able to handle massive amounts of data.

As someone who works a lot with zbrush exporting and importing heavy geometry from zbrush can be kinda tedious and wastes a lot of time, it would be great if there was an app that could handle that much geometry with ease. Sort of like what the new Keyshot bridge to zbrush is attempting to do, but not as limited because I don't think Keyshot is an ideal solution for putting together huge complex scenes or even mildly complex scenes.

Fabric can already handle a lot of data, and 2.0 is a big step up from that. I'll update when we have something to show.