Fabric Engine sees five years out

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.”

Creation Platform is a frame work for uniting custom tools and commercial software into a single production pipeline. (Source: Fabric Engine)
Creation Platform is a framework to facilitate custom development of high-performance production tools. (Source: Fabric Engine)

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.