Request for comment - Fabric Engine character tools

Tools
#21

I am sorry but I fail to see what value this would add to an engine.

For me, the gist I get of it is:

“Is your pipeline complex due to mocap processing in MotionBuilder + Animation Editing in Maya?” … Fabric solution: “Stop using mocap” … Atleast that’s what your arrow-graph said.
“Do you suffer from Maya having a different content abstraction than your engine?” … Fabric solution: “Add another abstraction level!”

For me, these are not effective solutions.

In case I’ve misunderstood what you’re trying to solve and what your solutions are; perhaps your videos are just lacking?
Perhaps I’ve just misunderstood what market segment you are aiming for?

#22

Not too sure what part of the thread you’re referring to - I’m assuming it’s the character pipeline for games video: https://vimeo.com/groups/fabric/videos/38596950. Let me know if I’m wrong :slight_smile:

We didn’t say ‘Stop using mocap’, and we didn’t say “add another abstraction level” - are you referring to the slide at 9:45 in? The slide is saying that Fabric can be used for the entirety of the character authoring pipeline - including mocap (it is written in the arrow text…).

The approach with Fabric and game engines is to address the problem with character pipelines comes from the representation of the character in the editing tool (Maya, MoBu etc) being different to run-time representation - this leads to destruction/generalization of data when moving from editing to run-time. What we are advocating is that the data structures and solvers used when animating can be exported to the engine as C++ solvers, which stops destruction of data. This requires a different approach to characters that allows for custom mocap and animation tools that are specific to the run-time - that’s what we’re targeting.

Hope that helps.

Paul

#23

Another couple of updates:

  1. This shows off the direct rendering inside the maya viewport using Fabric Engine, very high performance due to game engine like rendering pipeline, vertex buffer objects + GLSL shaders. https://vimeo.com/groups/fabric/videos/42775608

  2. socket connection to C4D: https://vimeo.com/groups/fabric/videos/42759603

#24

the last video for this week, a demo of the new hair simulation nodes, as well as the AlembicExporter manager.

https://vimeo.com/groups/fabric/videos/42838853

#25

one last one (Helge worked all of Saturday getting this finished): Rendering a full Fabric Engine Rendering Pipeline into the Maya viewport including basic interaction. https://vimeo.com/groups/fabric/videos/42890032

Enjoy :slight_smile: