Adobe Fuse

» see adobe.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Nothing had gone wrong with Fuse on the morning it stopped working. The code was the same code that shipped in 2014 and it still did exactly what it claimed. What moved was the floor underneath it. Apple took 32 bit support out of macOS in October 2019, and a program nobody at Adobe had meaningfully touched in four years simply failed to come up when you clicked it.

What it did was make human beings out of parts. You picked a head from a library and a body to attach it to, and the software blended the seam so the result read as one person instead of a kit. Sliders moved the proportions around. A wardrobe put clothes on it. Then the finished figure went up to Mixamo, which dropped a skeleton inside it without being asked and handed back something that could be told to walk. Somebody with no training in character modeling could get an animated human out of it inside half an hour, and that was the whole pitch.

The method came out of Stanford, from work by Siddhartha Chaudhuri under Vladlen Koltun published at SIGGRAPH in 2011 on assembling three dimensional models from libraries of components. Mixamo, itself a Stanford spin off founded in 2008 by Stefano Corazza and Nazim Kareemi, turned that into software and put a beta on Steam in November 2013. The proper release came on 27 March 2014. Adobe bought the company on 1 June 2015 and Fuse came along with the purchase, rebranded and given away free to anyone paying for Creative Cloud.

I was never on the making side of this. Where my own work eventually met synthetic humans it came from the opposite direction, not building one body carefully enough to look at but generating enough of them to teach a model what a person looks like from four hundred meters up. Fuse was built for somebody blocking out a level who needed a body standing in a doorway before lunch. That is a real job and it was never mine.

~ the dossier ~

~ the parts bin ~

The interesting decision in Fuse was that it treated a person as an assembly rather than a sculpture. Every other route to a character asked you to either model one from nothing or buy one finished. Fuse sat between those, with a catalog of heads and torsos that were built to fit each other, and it would take your own geometry into the same system if you brought it, blending your part into the library's parts as though they had always belonged together. Adobe fed it high resolution body scans after the acquisition, so the raw material got better even while the application did not.

It was a previsualization tool and it never pretended otherwise. Nothing coming out of Fuse was going in a finished game as a hero character. It was for the crowd, the placeholder, the shot you needed before anyone had budget for a modeler, which is a large and permanently underserved part of how three dimensional work actually gets made.

~ what a deprecation actually kills ~

Adobe announced the end in September 2019, citing the macOS incompatibility and a strategic move toward what it called the future of 3D and AR. Downloads came off the site on 13 September 2020 and the direct upload path from Fuse into Mixamo stopped working on the 28th of the same month, which is the date that mattered more, because the upload was the part that made the software useful rather than a novelty.

Mixamo survived and is still there, still rigging for nothing, which makes this an unusual grave: the expensive back end lived and the friendly front end died. Two other Mixamo tools, Decimator and Face Plus, had already gone in 2017. The future of 3D and AR that Adobe named in the announcement turned into Substance on one side and Aero on the other, and Aero is buried here as well. Anyone still wanting what Fuse did has spent the years since choosing between a free tool from a game engine company and a paid one, which is the ordinary condition of this software category and the exact thing Fuse had briefly interrupted.

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