New Creation Platform allows both custom M&E tools and commercial software to work side-by-side.
Media and Entertainment technology has followed the same evolutionary path as other industries, from in-house development to high-priced custom products to commodity software—except that M&E is still transitioning in the direction of commodity software. Fabric Engine targets that transition with tools for both creative and support techs. “Where will the pipeline be five years from now?” asks Fabric Engine CEO Paul Doyle. “No one can do custom everything.”
Fabric Engine was showing off its latest iteration of Creation Platform, a framework to facilitate the custom development of high-performance production tools. It uses Kernel Language (KL), a programming environment that Fabric Engine developed to give technical directors a facile tool for application development without the tedium of C++. Fabric Engine used Kernel Language to develop three applications it was showing at Siggraph:
- Creation: Horde offers procedural locomotion for crowds and characters.
- Creation: Splice exposes the core execution engine and KL to any host application for building custom applications.
- Creation: Stage provides authoring tools for scene assembly, lighting, and shader management.
All can be used as a foundation to build animation tools and for image and video processing, real-time rendering, motion capture, simulation, and other tasks where the bottom line would be better served by using off-the-shelf software but directors want the creative control of custom apps.
