Summary

Fabric is a creative coding and rapid prototyping environment designed for interactive visuals, image/video processing, and 3D content authoring. It targets users ranging from those with minimal programming experience to professional developers, offering an intuitive node-based visual interface and an SDK for extending its capabilities. Fabric aims to provide a modern, high-fidelity visual development experience, drawing inspiration from Apple's Quartz Composer.

How It Works

The core of Fabric is its visual node-based authoring environment, allowing users to connect nodes to create complex visual pipelines. It leverages the Satin 3D engine for advanced rendering, supporting Physically Based Rendering (PBR), real-time shader editing, and GPU compute. An SDK facilitates the creation of custom nodes via a plugin architecture and the loading of common interchange file formats, enabling reusable documents and integration into third-party applications.

Quick Start & Requirements

• Installation: For developers, clone the repository with submodules enabled (Satin dependency), open the Xcode project, set "Fabric Editor" as the active target, and build/run. Pre-signed app downloads are available via Releases.
• Prerequisites: macOS 14+, Xcode 15+.
• Resources: Architecture Document, tutorials, sample compositions, Node list, and Roadmap Document are available.

Highlighted Details

• High-fidelity rendering via Satin, including PBR, scene graph, lighting, shadow casting, and Image Based Lighting.
• Real-time shader editing with live coding and hot reloading.
• ML-based real-time segmentation and keypoint detection.
• GPU Compute and shader-based image processing capabilities.

Maintenance & Community

Authored by Anton Marini, Fabric aims to foster a community similar to Quartz Composer's ecosystem. Contributions and interest are welcomed via GitHub or Discord.

Licensing & Compatibility

The license is not explicitly stated in the provided README. Fabric is strictly limited to macOS due to its reliance on Metal.

Limitations & Caveats

The project is in an early alpha stage and heavily under construction. It is exclusively designed for Apple platforms and is not cross-platform.