Hello everyone,
First of all I'd like to thank Paul and Phil at Fabric Engine for
approaching me about this project. It's very exciting to be working with
Fabric Engine in this capacity and also to be able to work with Raf and
David as well. I think this endeavor is going to be beneficial to all
parties involved and we'll be able to demonstrate how studios can
utilize Fabric Engine through this rigging framework to be able to
produce consistent rigs across applications. We're targeting Softimage
and Maya initially and as Paul mentioned spanning out from there as needed.
The main issue that many of us have faced is that it has been virtually
impossible to produce the same rig that behaved exactly the same in
multiple applications. This is due to the fact that the internal solvers
that each application are inherently different. You could get pretty
close but never a 1 to 1 match. This all changed with the recent
deployment of Fabric Engine Splice. As demonstrated in many videos
already, you can create a rig solver once and deploy in all the
applications that are supported to run Splice.
I started developing my in house rigging system at Hybride about 6-7
months ago with the intention of just creating a general purpose Python
rigging module that I could use in Softimage and Maya. I knew that I may
not have been able to get a 1 to 1 rig performance but I was willing to
have something close rather than nothing at all. While working on this I
started experimenting more and more with Splice and quickly realized I
had my solver solution at hand. At this point I've built a lot of the
nuts and bolts of the system and have a prototyped Arm solver that is
building the arm control layer and then applying my Splice file to this
structure and I can confirm that it's a 1 to 1 match in Softimage and Maya.
Having a solution like this will enable us to move our rigging and
animation pipeline over to Maya within the coming years, while also
keeping it rather abstract and safe to be ported to other platforms like
Max or Houdini whenever the Splice plug-ins are ready. Who knows, there
may even be another platform that comes out of nowhere where it could be
added as well.
To explain more precisely what this system is intended to be, it's a
rigging framework aimed at TD's. It's not a auto rig solution and I'm
not aiming for it to be either at this point. That's not to say one
couldn't be built around it, it very well could, but I want to keep this
project aimed as precisely as possible at the target of being a nuts and
bolts framework that other systems can be built on top of. It could
evolve into a larger toolset later on but for the immediate roadmap that
is where it stands.
I'm super excited to be a part of this project and being able to work
with Fabric on this solution rather than in tandem is going to be
greatly beneficial to Hybride, Fabric, and the users of Fabric.
We'll be posting progress along the way so stay tuned folks!
Cheers,
Eric T.
