Fabric Engine Enters VR Realm

Fabric Engine is used in the film, TV and games industries to build content creation tools ranging from rigging and animation to scene assembly and lighting. With version 1.14, it will also appeal to developers of virtual reality (VR) content, as well as interactive content display.

“We are particularly focused on non-games use cases for VR,” explains Fabric Software chief executive Paul Doyle. “There are many exciting applications appearing in the areas of interactive storytelling, product visualization, and architectural visualization, and we bring something new to the table that should get VR developers thinking about what could be possible. Fabric Engine works with native data formats and offers the ability to edit that data directly in real time – this takes VR from pure display and moves it to being a completely immersive authoring environment.”

Fabric is designed to easily incorporate different hardware, data types and software into the same framework. It works both standalone and with digital content creation packages such as Autodesk’s 3ds Max and Maya. It comes with a real-time renderer, an extension system and an interaction model, making it easy to build a range of VR applications. Version 1.14 includes extensions for four major input devices i.e. XBox Controller, Razer Hydra, Leap Motion and Midi devices, as well as integration with Oculus Rift.

Fabric allows developers to make changes to their running application, enabling them to experience the edits as they are made. It also loads, displays and can edit Alembic and FBX data (and can be extended to support other data types). This is a big change from preparing data to run in a game engine and should result in much shorter iteration cycles as well as certainty that assets are identical in authoring and in playback.