Hi guys - Paul here, I'm one of the founders of Fabric (previously at Softimage and Autodesk). Someone pinged me a link to this conversation and asked if I could contribute. I hope I'm not intruding.
Happy to answer any questions you have. There are a few points worth making: 1) we use our own language because there's nothing out there that offers what we need - the dynamic, rapid prototyping of Python with the performance capability of well-written, multi-threaded C++ (or CUDA). Trust me when I say we didn't want to do it but saw no other option given our goals. However, it really is paying off - a TD can now write Fabric tools that run on the CPU or GPU without any changes. 2) Fabric is not middleware. It's a standalone framework that can also be run inside of other applications (Maya, Softimage, Arnold, Nuke currently - Max, Houdini and more to come). Most importantly, it's open - the only black box is the core execution engine, everything else is there to be changed/extended/replaced as required. 'Middleware' tends to suggest black boxes and opacity, which we set out from day one to avoid. 3) Fabric is really just a commercial version of what many studios have been building for themselves for many years. We've got the benefit of not being pulled in a particular direction by any one production, which means the platform stays more generally useful. We offer source code access as part of site licensing, which addresses many of the concerns that studios have had. 4) Fabric is completely portable - you can move the tools/assets/data between 'Spliced' applications and into the standalone framework. The fact is that pipelines are heterogeneous so we do our best to play nice with everyone. In some cases there's value in building a standalone version of a tool, and Fabric offers that. 5) I can't speak for what other vendors think of Fabric, but we have good relationships with all of them. We're not building a complete DCC and have no plans to do so - we're just another piece of the pipeline. There's an argument that we break 'lock-in' to a particular DCC, but that's something that studios want and vendors have to respond to - initiatives like Alembic have proven that to be the case. 6) we've been in operation for 4 years now, so the technology is maturing well and having customers like MPC really help when it comes to hardening our technology for production. It's still early days but we've been out of beta for a long time now and are about to move to FE2.0. I hoped this helped - feel free to ping me directly if you prefer to talk offline. Thanks, Paul -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Python Programming for Autodesk Maya" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/python_inside_maya/516a4049-0974-4b09-8a31-a5d926e42357%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
