Hi everyone - I thought I'd let you know about an exciting project that we are involved with. I believe it serves a few purposes that are good for Fabric and good for you guys as well. It's very early days, but given recent events and the questions people keep asking us, I would rather get this out there now.
We have formed a working group with Eric Thivierge (Hybride), Raffaele Fragapane (personal project, nothing to do with Animal Logic), Dave Gallagher (AnimSchool) and a few other people I don't think we can mention yet, but have equally impressive backgrounds. The goal of the group is to build a rigging system that takes full advantage of Fabric for performance, and also enables rigs to be moved between DCC applications that have been integrated with Fabric (Maya and Softimage for sure, possibly Max and Houdini later). If things proceed as we all hope then this tool will be used within Hybride for production and, more importantly, we will open-source the tool (note: it still needs Fabric to run) so that other people can contribute and/or fork for their own needs. If all goes well then Dave at AnimSchool will work with us to build a rig that shows off the capabilities of the approach. We will then work to producing the toolset for building these kinds of rigs. >From Fabric's perspective, this approach will form the foundation of everything else we want to do with character animation (crowds, sims etc). We will be contributing time to the project to ensure all required Fabric components are in place and generally making sure things go smoothly. I have asked Eric to explain roughly what he's been doing with Fabric at Hybride and how he sees things moving forward. It is very early days, but we're committed to making sure this succeeds and proves what can be possible with this collaborative model. As things get nailed down we will start looking for interested parties to get involved with the effort. Something to be crystal clear on is that Fabric is not leading this project, and have no veto over design - we'll offer our expertise but it's critical that this is driven by the production people involved. It also means the model is scalable for us. We are looking at a few other areas where this might be possible, so if you have the technical chops to build a similar group then please contact me. Fabric benefits greatly from this, as we have other people building production-level tools and workflows with us - however, we do give free licenses to individuals so I think there's a certain amount of goodwill shown there. Interested to hear your thoughts on this. Cheers, Paul
