aha, the thread smoothly turned into FE discussion ))) great Clara.io will also have nodal tools, great, great !!! Houdini VOP also awesome with your permission i`ll raise the question once again - where will you move ?
2014-03-01 0:23 GMT+04:00 Mathieu Leclaire <mlecl...@hybride.com>: > When we first played with FE, it was very overwhelming and it was a lot > to take in. They have done tremendous work to make it much easier to > pick-up and run with it with minimum efforts. > > Splice made life so much easier and Eric's been creating some pretty > impressive rig set-up very quickly. FE is still young and we have often > faced bugs, but there support is very good and fast so they've sent us > fixes very quickly which allows us to make the tools viable in production. > > The first project we tried to use FE on, we ended up pulling the plug in > the end, because we couldn't turn around and completely redesign stuff as > quickly as we needed to. We fell back unto a ICE based solution as it was > much easier to adapt it in the limited amount of time we had. But I had > seen the power of Fabric and I knew that with a bit more learning on our > side and a bit more work on their side, it would become our tool of choice > down the road. It has very much become our spine, even though we still have > a lot of work to do. > > We've been working on some tools for a long time so some of them where > built on the old way of doing it and has become extremely complex with > time. But again, they've improved a lot of things which makes it so much > easier to debug, easier to implement new features and transitioning our > tools from one version of FE to the next has become so much easier then it > was on some of the first builds. It depends on what you want to do really. > Some stuff can be very quick and easy, and some stuff is still a bit long > and complex to implement, but it was to be expected knowing this is still > very new technology and very much in fluctuation. > > I'm a huge ICE power user so I'm very much awaiting their 2.0 node-based > solution. From what I've been hearing, those who are somewhat uncomfortable > coding will be well served when that comes out. We have a ton ICE based > tools that we will be re-designing in FE once this feature is released. For > that reason, Softimage's demise doesn't really scare me anymore. It's going > to be a lot of work to redo all those tools we've built over the years, but > they will all be so much better with FE behind them, and they will be > easily portable to any DCC we chose to use. > > Kind of like ICE was at first, this is a framework so there's not much out > of the box solutions really available. We have to create our own tools, but > once we do, they are impressively fast and extremely powerful. If you are > looking for off the shelf solutions, then going into something like Houdini > is probably the wisest thing to do for now. There wasn't too many solutions > in ICE at the beginning either, and I think that with time, the community > will grow, people will start creating and sharing or selling tools and it > will become even more loved then ICE ever was. > > Working with FE made us realize how old the Softimage infrastructure was > and how much it was holding us back. It was limiting the performance of our > work. I was really impressed by the performance of ICE, but man, we didn't > realize how much more we could get out of our machines until we started > using FE. With FE, there's no intermediate layer that slows our tools down > anymore and we're constantly surprised how much we can pull out of our > workstations. It doesn't have the same comfort of all the little tools and > user friendly workflows that have been accumulated over the years, but > Softimage and other DCCs will always be accessible and FE was designed in a > way that makes it easy to make them work together anyway. > > Is FE the solution to all your problems? Of course not, but it's a damn > powerful tool to have when you need to build high-performance custom tools. > > -Mathieu > > > On 28/02/2014 11:40 AM, Eric Thivierge wrote: > > Ahem, > > In terms of the stuff I've been doing, Fabric is in a really usable state > within Splice right now. Mainly building rigs for me. The performance is > pretty nuts and I've just built a rig that replaces our old Softimage only > setup and I can't give you solid numbers but the frame rate went from ~4fps > to ~20-30fps. Plus it gives us more control and features. > > With the help of Helge to add an additional feature to one of the built in > types, we were able to create the required operator and the prototyping / > implementation was within a week or so. Granted I've been getting my feet > wet with Fabric Engine and KL off and on for 6 months. I've had other > things to jump on but if you're a solid TD with a good amount of > programming background it'll only take you a few weeks to a month to get to > a point where you can pump stuff out. Looking forward to getting off a few > other tasks to get back onto the Splice work. > > One cool thing for me is that you can draw OpenGL shapes and interfaces > that allow your animator's to get some better feedback on what's happening > in the rig without having to know any C++. It's just there in Splice. They > are adding some cool stuff in the coming releases (before 2.0) that's going > to be really exciting in many respects regarding Splice. > > If you have any more Q's just post back. > > Eric T. > > On 2/28/2014 11:21 AM, Paul Doyle wrote: > > > I would rather guys like Eric and Guillaume (and Mathieu if he has the > time!) commented here - you're going to get a clearer production > perspective imo. > > >
