Re: something to cheer you guys up a bit :)

[Helge Mathee]

The real issue here is performance. ICE by itself is fast, our core is 
fast by itself as well. Now to integrate our core into ICE is kind of 
difficult, essentially due to competition of greedy schedulers. We can 
of course do that by adding a single threaded node inside of ICE, but 
that kind of defeats the purpose. The lack of flexibility for 
procedurally created ports within an ICE node also makes it very hard to 
integrate there.

Of course you can build ICE nodes for specific purposes. For Horde for 
example we've integrated in there, but the data streamed is trivial 
(1000 matrices etc). Once you get into millions of particles the 
performance will drop.

I don't think it's required at all to integrate the Splice system into 
the ICE graph, since at that point portability won't work anyway.

-H

On 02.08.2013 10:39, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
Hi Paul,

one question: Since SPLICE for Softimage will use classic operators 
rather than ICE, I was wondering what the current status is regarding 
FE interaction with ICE. I remember some of your/Helges videos where 
you showed deformations and other things controlled through ICE by 
talking to a CP App through (what looked like generic) ICE nodes. Is 
this still a viable solution? I never found any documentation or 
sample scenes on this (at least not in the downloadable packages, I 
admit I did not scour the Github repo), but found it really exciting. 
My hope is that even if SPLICE will not be integrated with ICE I could 
still use the detour via a CP Application (if I understand the concept 
correctly).


Hi everyone - now we're back from Siggraph and recovered, we've started
working on Spliced Softimage. Should have a first prototype next week.

https://twitter.com/FabricPaul/status/362975245562437632/photo/1

The Hybride guys have been doing some awesome stuff with FE already, 
so I
can't wait to get this into their hands soon :) Eric might stop stalking
the Montreal employees as well, which would be nice.

A description of Spliced Softimage:
Creation:Splice will be integrated into Softimage as a new class of 
custom
operators. Each operator can be setup using the SpliceEditor IDE, 
defining
ports, adding removing them etc, very much like the Scripted Operator
Editor. The IDE will also contain a KL Source Code editor as well as
functionality for dynamically compiling the code etc. Operators defined
with the SpliceEditor will become completely portable between all 
support
host applications, such as Maya, Softimage and Nuke, for example.

We are not integrating KL into ICE, for a range of reasons. Splice is
targeting areas where ICE doesn't work so well, i.e. Fast procedural
geometry, kinematics, simulated rigs, custom OpenGL drawing etc Splice
solves the portability issues of moving tools between applications, 
and as
such we try to take a consistent approach within applications.

This also means I don't get to make up such compelling slogans as 
"Spliced
ICE baby", which is frankly disappointing.

If you want to understand more about Splice, please visit the webpage:
http://fabricengine.com/creation/splice/

Cheers,

Paul