character rigs portable between applications... isn’t that like the holy grail? this sounds like a HUGE step in freeing productions from a single DCC application.
From: Paul Doyle Sent: Monday, August 26, 2013 6:23 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Fabric Engine - portable characters and manipulation Hi guys – we’ve been working hard on the rigging and manipulation work for Splice. I’m happy to say we’re able to show you that work, and our aim is to make a drop of this available to the Splice test group sometime in September. We will be opening up Splice to the general Creation list soon (October/November), but please mail me if you’d like to get on board now (our minimum requirement is coding experience with Python as a TA/TD/programmer in production). Below is an excerpt from the webpage. We’d really appreciate your feedback on this, as it’s an area we think is ripe for some innovation. Cheers, Paul “In most DCC applications (Maya, Softimage etc) manipulation and the way it works is a fixture of the rig. For example, if you want to manipulate an object's rotation with a position in 3D you can only do that by building an auxiliary rig. If you need further options and more versatility these rigs can grow extremely complex and hard to manage. Furthermore, the evaluation of heavy rigs like this really slows down the application, which has a direct impact on the speed and quality of animation work. Splice Manipulation provides a new way of adding custom manipulation to any Spliced application in a portable fashion. Any KL object can now implement callbacks for manipulation, allowing TDs to build their own workflows very easily. Essentially, these rigs and their manipulation framework can be moved freely between applications. The Splice manipulation system ties deeply into the host application's animation system, so you can animate Splice manipulation components as if they were native objects. The Splice manipulation framework is only present at the time of the manipulation. This means that cyclic dependencies in the data (such as a symmetry interaction, for example) can be implemented without a problem. The complex math can happen only at manipulation time, so that the rig's performance isn't affected by the complexity of the manipulation features. This allows for powerful, flexible authoring capabilities _and_ high-performance of the rigs themselves. Splice Manipulation in Maya and Softimage Maya: https://vimeo.com/73146827 Softimage https://vimeo.com/73147499 If you'd like to learn more about the rigging paradigm in Creation, you can read the article here” http://fabricengine.com/splice/spliced-rigging/
