@Felix: I totally agree on the bundling forces part.
I've been on the Fabric Beta since over a year and am pondering over making a standalone application ever since.
I have both plans for a hair/fur editing app as well as a general-purpose 3D application (at least the foundation of that) that can be extended and built upon by me and others. Blender comes very close to that ideal but it looks almost like a dead end compared to what FE already has to offer (accessibility of the API, Multithreading, Qt, etc), plus it would take a lot of changes to shape it into what I'd like it to look like, and that will be hard to gety ba the ecisting developers and communits.
So far I've been held back by having to earn money in actual production, the (very) little time left gets mostly eaten up by my family.
I've been thinking of kickstarting it, but there's a whole slew of steps involved to make that happen successfully. Is anyone familiar with the Blender business model? They do have permanent paid staff, right? Where do they get their funding from?
@Andy J.:Thanks for summing it up so nicely and comprehensively. I need to disagree on the modeling part though. Even in XSI I miss a lot, especially in terms of symmetrical modeling and sculpting. There is huge potential for improvement in any existing application out there.
If anyone
(individuals and companies alike)
is out there who is interested in collaborating on such projects or just wants to share advice and or/ ideas, whether technical or financial - I'm all ears.
If this isn't the right moment in time I don't know which one is. Will, need and technology is there. Right now.
Great post Andy! I'm probably biased, because I'm mainly working as a lighter. But after thinking about the future for the last couple of days, I came to the very same conclusion. Lighting and scene assembly is the biggest hole to fill. Houdini will be a great replacement for FX and with stuff like open VDB, alembic, partiio, etc it should become easier to move stuff in and out. Modeling can happen anywhere since a while.Rigging and animation isn't that easy. But animation isn't that technical and animators usually don't take long to switch. Rigging is more difficult. But Maya isn't that bad in rigging. And now there is Fabric. And I think for rigging it is already 90% of where it should be. People like Eric are already building stuff with it. And the advantage here is that rigging is a very modular and job specific process. With a few solvers and deformers you're already up and running, and everything else, you build on top as you need it. And that's the problem with a Fabric scene assembly application. You'd basically need to build a complete and highly complex application from scratch which covers all your needs. Otherwise you won't be able to work with it. And from what I know that's what keeps many people in smaller studios from using fabric in this area. It's just financially impossible to build such an application from scratch. I was really disappointed when I heard that the Fabric guys won't continue Stage for now (although I understand their reasons). And all the other efforts I know of (except for Steven's Arnold connection) are happening inside studios and most likely won't be shared.So now that Softimage will be gone, isn't there room or even need for collaboration here? Before everybody tries to build something themselves, shouldn't people try to bundle forces? And I'm not only talking about individuals here. I'm talking about small to medium size companies who couldn't afford to build something like this alone.2014-03-04 20:39 GMT+01:00 Juhani Karlsson <[email protected]>:
Now I`m interested about this mailing list too - its full of Kings!Fabric definetly has bright future if you just keep on pushin - and Caron that sounds really good : )
Is it going to stay? If not where should we go?
--On 4 March 2014 21:35, Paul <[email protected]> wrote:
I'm going to be going Fabric too for sure.you can create arnold scenes with the kl language! this is a step toward my own scene assembly tool. i am imagining something between softimage and katana.That sounds exactly like a place I want to be. <3--Juhani Karlsson
3D Artist/TD
Talvi Digital Oy
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00150 Helsinki
+358 443443088
[email protected]
www.vimeo.com/talvi
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Stefan Kubicek
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keyvis digital imagery
Alfred Feierfeilstraße 3
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Phone: +43/699/12614231
www.keyvis.at [email protected]
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