Fabric Software CEO Paul Doyle said: “We’ve had great feedback from customers since launching the Canvas visual programming system last September but it was clear we needed to make the Fabric Engine experience – from getting started all the way to building complex tools – more intuitive and more productive. With that in mind, we’ve concentrated on making Fabric Engine 2.1 easier to use by providing more Canvas presets, more samples and better visual debugging info. And there are plenty of goodies for people focused on building more complex tools.”
Highlights of the release include:
• Canvas presets that focus on geometry attributes
• Canvas presets for Alembic
• DFGBindings for treating Canvas graphs as objects
Attribute Presets
Geometry attributes are a critical part of most geometry pipelines and are used to handle distribution of instances, deformations, UV mapping and more. Controlling geometry attributes in an efficient and simple way can improve workflow and significantly improve productivity. Fabric Engine 2.1 ships with a series of new Canvas presets that focus on geometry attributes.
More information about Attribute Presets
Fabric Engine has supported Alembic for a long time but developers had to be pretty comfortable with coding in Fabric’s Kernel Language (KL) to take advantage of it. Now, developers can access this functionality through presets in Canvas.
More information: http://fabricengine.com/high-level-alembic-presets/
Graphs Flowing Through Graphs:
A new core feature in KL and a big enhancement to the Canvas visual programming system is the DFGBinding object. DFGBindings allow developers to dramatically increase the flexibility and reuse of large scale systems by allowing them to pass Canvas graphs as objects around their graphs.
More information: http://fabricengine.com/graphs-flowing-through-graphs/
Availability
Another focus has been to provide more video demos and tutorials to support developers as they learn how to use Fabric Engine. See http://fabricengine.com/showcase/
Fabric Engine 2.1 is available for download at http://fabricengine.com/get-fabric/.
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