Fabric Engine

Fabric Engine
Information
Type	Graphics development framework
Industry	Visual effects, games, virtual reality, visualization
Developer	Fabric Software (earlier Fabric Engine Inc.), Montreal
Operating System	Windows, Linux, Mac OS X
License	Proprietary commercial licences (the March 2012 debut release was also offered under the AGPL)
Supported Devices	Oculus Rift; input extensions for Razer Hydra, Leap Motion, Xbox controller and MIDI devices (version 1.14)
Release Date	October 2011 (public beta); March 2012 (debut release); October 2015 (Fabric Engine 2); August 2017 (version 2.6, the last reported release)
Website	http://fabricengine.com (defunct)

Fabric Engine was a software framework for building high-performance computer graphics, visual effects and visualization tools, made by Fabric Software (originally Fabric Engine Inc.), a company in Montreal, Canada. Film, television and game studios used it to write custom pipeline tools for rigging, animation, scene assembly and lighting, and by 2017 plug-ins let it run inside Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, Softimage and Modo.

Fabric Engine is relevant to virtual reality because the company built VR authoring and review tools on top of it. Version 1.14, released in December 2014, added Oculus Rift support, and between 2015 and 2016 Fabric showed prototypes for storyboarding, set dressing and CAD review inside a headset, an Unreal Engine integration pitched at previsualization and VR, and portable character rigs developed with Oculus Story Studio. Fabric Software stopped developing the software in 2017. In January 2023, press reports citing The Information said Apple had quietly acquired the company in 2017 and was using its technology in a tool for making augmented reality apps; Apple declined to comment.

Reviewed 21 October 2026. Checked every claim against the cited CGW, CG Channel, GfxSpeak, MCV, AWN, Road to VR, 3DVF, Engadget, MIXED and McNeel pages and the DigiPro 2016 paper metadata. About review dates.

History

Founding and browser platform (2010-2012)

Fabric Engine was started by former employees of Softimage. GfxSpeak reported in February 2012 that the company had been started 18 months earlier by a small team from Softimage, which included Philip Taylor, Peter Zion (vice president of engineering), Helge Mathee and Jerome Couture-Gagnon, and that chief executive Paul Doyle had come from Softimage and Autodesk. CG Channel named Phil Taylor, a developer of the Character Animation Toolkit, as the company's founder, and MCV described Doyle as CEO and co-founder. Several of the founders had worked on ICE, the node-based Interactive Creative Environment in Softimage XSI. GfxSpeak described ICE as limited by being "shoehorned into a legacy, single-threaded software architecture", and Doyle said the new company set out "to build a 3D application platform that would massively outperform the incumbents."

The first version was a platform for running multi-threaded graphics applications in a web browser. Interfaces were written with HTML5 and CSS, while performance-critical code was written in KL (Kernel Language), which GfxSpeak described as a performance-focused extension of JavaScript and CG Channel as a proprietary variant of it. KL was compiled with LLVM and work was scheduled in parallel through a dependency graph. A public beta released in October 2011 ran on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in Firefox and Chrome, with demos of Bullet physics, hair simulation and an Alembic model viewer. The debut release followed in March 2012. It was available under the AGPL open-source license, with a commercial license for developers who wanted to avoid the AGPL; Doyle called it "the culmination of more than two years of hard work".

Creation Platform (2012-2014)

In August 2012 the company announced Creation Platform, which it showed at SIGGRAPH 2012 in Los Angeles. It was a graphics technology stack built with Python and Qt that ran on Fabric Core, the multi-threaded execution engine. It supported formats including OBJ, FBX, Alembic, Ptex, EXR and LIDAR data, included Bullet physics, rigging and animation libraries, and integrated with Maya and Cinema 4D. CG Channel had at first suggested that it was a rebranding of Fabric Engine 1.0; Doyle said it was not. Beta testers quoted at launch included Zoic Studios, Hybride, Halon Entertainment, Ingenuity Engine and The Third Floor.

At SIGGRAPH 2013 the company showed three applications built with KL: Creation: Horde for procedural crowd and character locomotion, Creation: Splice, which exposed the execution engine and KL to any host application, and Creation: Stage for scene assembly, lighting and shader management.

Fabric Engine 2 (2015-2017)

In August 2015 Fabric Software announced that it would launch Fabric Engine 2 at SIGGRAPH 2015 in Los Angeles and said that Double Negative, MPC, Hybride and Psyop were using Fabric Engine in production. Fabric Engine 2 became available for download on October 14, 2015. Its main addition was Canvas, a node-based visual programming system for building tools without writing code, which Fabric aimed at VFX, games, virtual reality and visualization. The company said almost 600 customers had taken part in the beta, and listed MPC, Double Negative, Hybride, Blur and Psyop as users.

Version 2.3, released in July 2016, added Blocks, containers inside Canvas presets that let technical directors expose a small set of controls to artists. Version 2.4 in January 2017 bundled Kraken, an open-source rigging framework developed in-house at Hybride and first released publicly in 2015, and supported Maya, Softimage, 3ds Max and Modo as host applications. Version 2.6 was announced on August 4, 2017, with support for Pixar's Universal Scene Description, Autodesk's AnimX animation curve library, a radial basis function solver for pose-based deformation, and a beta plug-in for Unreal Engine 4. 3DVF reported on August 25, 2017 that it had launched a few days earlier.

Discontinuation and reported Apple acquisition

By October 28, 2017 the Fabric Engine homepage said "we are no longer developing our software platform and tools", and the company's Vimeo and social media channels had become inaccessible; Fabric Software told CG Channel it could not comment.

On January 27, 2023, Engadget, citing a report by The Information, wrote that Apple was working on a tool that would let people build augmented reality apps for its then-unreleased mixed reality headset by describing them to Siri. According to that report, the tool was based on technology from Fabric Software, "a Canadian company Apple quietly bought in 2017", and Fabric co-founder Peter Zion was believed to be running the project. Apple declined to comment. MIXED described Fabric Software as a Montreal startup that Apple "reportedly" acquired in 2017, said the acquisition had not been known before, and noted that Zion's LinkedIn profile listed him as a software engineering manager who joined Apple in 2017. CG Channel added these reports to its 2017 article in a June 2023 update.

Features

Fabric Engine was a framework rather than an end-user application. Its core was a multi-threaded execution engine that ran code written in KL, and the same KL code could run standalone or inside a host application through plug-ins. The company said its tools worked with native data formats such as Alembic and FBX, which it contrasted with preparing data to run in a game engine, and developers could change a running application and see the edits immediately. From version 2.0, Canvas let users build tools by connecting nodes instead of writing KL.

Selected releases

Version	Date	Notable changes
Public beta	October 2011	Browser platform on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux; Firefox and Chrome
Debut release	March 2012	Download release under the AGPL or a commercial license
Creation Platform	August 2012 (announced)	Python and Qt stack on Fabric Core; Maya and Cinema 4D integration
1.14	December 2014	Oculus Rift support; extensions for Xbox controller, Razer Hydra, Leap Motion and MIDI devices
2.0	October 2015	Canvas visual programming system; Maya and Softimage plug-ins
2.3	July 2016	Blocks for artist-facing Canvas presets
2.4	January 2017	Kraken rigging framework included; native curves; KL namespaces
2.6	August 2017	USD and AnimX support, RBF solver, Asset Patterns, beta UE4 plug-in

Licensing

The browser-era platform had free development tools and was free when running in the browser, with server-side use priced by the resources required. By 2016 Fabric Engine was sold commercially: CG Channel listed pricing from $2,000 for one interactive and five headless licences, a free first licence for individual artists, and a free "Fabric Fifty" package of 10 interactive and 40 headless licences for studios. At the 2.6 release, CG Channel reported that the software appeared to be rental-only, from $1,200 per year for one interactive and five headless licences, while free individual evaluation licences remained available.

VR and AR work

Oculus Rift support

Fabric Software described version 1.14, announced on December 2, 2014, as aimed at developers of virtual reality and interactive content. It added Oculus Rift integration, input extensions for the Xbox controller, Razer Hydra, Leap Motion and MIDI devices, a real-time renderer and an interaction model for VR applications. Doyle said the company was "particularly focused on non-games use cases for VR", naming interactive storytelling, product visualization and architectural visualization, and argued that editing native data in real time would turn VR from a display into an authoring environment.

Authoring and review prototypes

In October 2015 Fabric released a video, "Fabric Engine 2 for VR/AR", showing experiments and tools for virtual reality built on the platform, with the extensions published on its resources page. In November 2015 the company described a prototype set of VR storyboarding extensions for Fabric Engine 2. A designer could push a scene to a headset, add drawings and text after previewing animations, step through the timeline making notes on set dressing or props, and fold the changes back into the originating application. The demonstration video showed an Oculus Rift with a Razer Hydra controller and a Wacom tablet and stylus, and the stated aim was to bring the markup back into an authoring application such as Maya. Fabric also experimented with a motion capture extension that let a user walk around a digital set.

In March and April 2016 Fabric extended these VR and visualization tools to Rhino 3D, so that CAD data could be extracted, reviewed and optimized in real time, and invited CAD users to test an alpha version. The demos shown included virtual set dressing, in which Oculus and Hydra controllers were used to lay out furniture on the deck of a yacht; previsualization blocking with an Xsens motion capture suit; MIDI control of lighting and animation; and a virtual camera driven by an Xsens suit. Doyle said that "VR and AR technologies are opening up fantastic new content authoring and review capabilities".

Fabric for Unreal

Fabric for Unreal entered beta in May 2016. It loaded Alembic and Rhino 3DM files into Unreal Engine 4 while keeping the model hierarchy and material assignments, supported live markup and comments, although CG Channel said it did not appear to be a full live link, and was pitched at previsualization and VR work. Fabric described the usual FBX workflow from Maya and 3ds Max as one that "destroys data" with "no path back to the source application". In July 2016 Robert McNeel & Associates announced a SIGGRAPH 2016 session in which Fabric would show a pipeline for moving Rhino data, including materials, into Unreal; the announcement quoted Fabric as saying that Unreal was "a great engine for visualization and VR" but that there were "headaches" in getting architecture, engineering and construction data into it. The Unreal Engine 4 plug-in was still in beta at the 2.6 release in August 2017.

Character rigs for VR with Oculus Story Studio

At the DigiPro symposium in Anaheim on July 23, 2016, Helge Mathee of Fabric Engine Inc. and Bernhard Haux of Oculus Story Studio presented a work-in-progress pipeline for portable real-time character rigs. They used the Python-based Kraken tool to generate a rig that ran in Maya and a version that Fabric Engine executed inside Unreal Engine, so that the same full rig drove the character in the content creation application and in the VR experience. The authors described the approach as "What You Rig and Animate (in the DCC app) is What You Get (in the VR experience)" and said it kept film-quality characters with the same animation control.

See also

• Oculus Story Studio
• Unreal Engine
• Autodesk Maya
• Virtual production