MPC Taps Fabric’s FabricSG and Splice

MPC purchases a global site license of Fabric Engine, tapping Fabric Splice to build next-generation tools that fully leverage modern hardware.

Fabric Software Inc (formerly Fabric Engine Inc) announced that award-winning VFX studio Moving Picture Company (MPC), a division of Technicolor, has purchased a global site license of Fabric Engine, a development platform for building high-performance tools and applications for use in production.

MPC will be using Fabric Splice (an API for creating tools within other applications) to augment their existing pipeline, and Fabric SceneGraph (a standalone framework for building complete applications) to build next-generation tools that fully leverage modern hardware.

“We expect our use of Fabric Engine to transform the productivity of our developers and technical artists,” said Nick Cannon, Global Director of Technology for Film. “This will allow us to develop tools that we previously did not have the time to write and ultimately will dramatically improve the productivity of our artists through higher performance tools. The capability of Fabric to immediately scale with new hardware enables us to take advantage of the raw performance available from our multi-core CPUs and GPUs without refactoring our tools.”

MPC originally planned to write a next generation application framework that would take the company into the next stage of VFX making. But after they started reviewing FabricSG, they found the performance and design lined up so well with what they wanted that it made much more sense to partner with Fabric Software and build next-gen applications on top of the Fabric Engine framework.

“What our TDs really need is a simple environment to write their tools in, and Fabric Splice is perfect for this,” said Damien Fagnou, Global Head of Software. “We have always used scripting at MPC because our TDs and developers love the simplicity of it. The programming workflow for scripting makes for very fast iterations, but too often the runtime speed is not good enough. Now with Splice we can have the ease of use of scripting with the speed of a compiled language like C++.”

“In order to succeed, application frameworks need the right support and vision behind them,” added Fagnou. ”We have been so pleased with the team at Fabric Software, their passion and commitment to the framework really shows and we can't wait to work even more closely with them in the future!”

Source: Fabric Software Inc.

Jennifer Wolfe's picture

Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.