Hi Chris - there are a few people from this list on our alpha, so they might come and answer that question.
Lifted from my response to a similar question on si-community: That's a really lengthy topic that I would rather someone like EricT > covered I also don't want to get into 'but ICE can do that...' > conversations. ICE is a great system, but unfortunately it's stuck within > Softimage. The biggest differences that I usually raise: > 1) Fabric was designed as a general compute engine that we then built a 3D > layer on top of. ICE started out as a particle system that became more > generalised over time. Fabric is extremely broad and can tackle any > processing task. People tend to hit certain limitations with ICE due to the > original purpose of the design. > 2) ICE is extremely well-integrated within Softimage. Fabric is more like > Bifrost (my understanding at least) in that it is a self-contained unit > that is being accessed through the host application. This means that... > 3) Fabric is completely portable. We can move data and the tools for > working on that data (including manipulation etc) between Spliced > applications and inside our standalone C++ application. The downside is we > can only be as integrated as the host SDK allows us to be. > 4) Openness - everything bar the core engine is written in KL, which is > human-readable. You can change pretty much any aspect of the system. > 5) Extensibility - you can open any node and edit the KL code directly. > You can create new nodes by writing KL. Those nodes will be as performant > as any preset we provide. > 6) Performance - Fabric is extremely fast. With transparent GPU > compilation we are able to leverage GPUs for compute without requiring you > to do anything other than write KL. > There are much more significant technical differences but I won't cover > that here. You'll see some demos from us in the next week or two that will show some of the breadth of Fabric. There are some other big features coming as well in the next few drops. If I want to get any point across to people about FE2.0 and Canvas, it's this: Canvas is a visual programming front-end for everything that Fabric can already do. If there's a demo on our website or vimeo channel, you can build that with Canvas. This is not a 'new' system, it is just a new way of working with Fabric. Thanks, Paul On 12 March 2015 at 06:38, Chris Marshall <chrismarshal...@gmail.com> wrote: > This certainly looks amazing, but the obvious question is how similar is > this to ICE? What are the differences, benefits, positives, negatives, etc > etc > It certainly looks a lot like ICE! Which I like! > > >
