Alembic format in Blender

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21

Not specifically updates, but it’s got a mention under “Physics” in the May developer meetings notes at gooseberry.blender.org.

22

Please do something, this is VERY important.

23

Alembic is industry standard now and it works much better than FBX, I don’t understand why Blender is ignoring it. It is so important.

24

Its easy to understand why: its not needed for open movies, other than as a general caching format. For good and bad seems future features of Blender are closely tied to projects of the BF.

25

You’ll probably find this interesting…
http://gooseberry.blender.org/development-targets-for-gooseberry/

26

While I think alembic would be huge and I want it really bad, I’m not going to complain about BF “ignoring” it. Has anyone been paying attention to their to-do list? It’s absolutely huge and also really important. Everything from the dependency graph, to a modernized viewport, improving cycles speed, dynamics and sculpting improvements, the list goes on and on, and all of it is important. I know the bf wants alembic pretty bad, so it will happen. We just have to be patient and hope some more coders get involved to help out.

27

FBX and Alembic solve completely different problems. It’s not a matter of focusing on one over the other.

28

It’s to bad it seems to have a question mark next to it in the photo on the whiteboard. Also I suspect most people asking for alembic don’t care about using it for internal caches, they want it for data exchange with external applications.

It is a little unfortunate that Blender’s goal of being a complete solution for all aspects of the pipeline inevitably means these sorts of interoperability features inevitably receive lower priority.

29

Strange this has been brought up exactly today when a “alembic_pointcache” branch has been created.

30

Lukas Toenne started working on this last year, but it was in his personal github clone of blender’s source. Today was just the port of this branch to the blender repository (thus explaining the existing 80 or so commits).

31

Thanks for clarifying, i’ve just seen the 6 latest commits in the history by him…my point was about that when something goes into d.b.org branches by those core devs, “something will happen” sooner or later, it’s something they(he) are/is working on. So it’s a topic they care about, for those dying to get Alembic support

32

85 commits today to the branch – http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-blender-cvs/2014-October/date.html#end

33

nicely done doublebishop

34

I just wanted to remind everyone that the MDD format is very similar to Alembic and can be used right now in Blender. In fact, it’s actually the most commonly used Format for exchanging point cache data between different applications. There is currently either free or built in support for MDD in:

  • Blender
  • Maya
  • Modo
  • Houdini
  • LightWave
  • C4D
  • Messiah

So, if you are waiting for Alembic to exchange data between Blender and some other 3D app (besides 3DSMax), don’t wait. Use MDD.

EDIT: Oh! I almost forgot, Blender actually supports the .PC2 format. So actually, if you needed to get animation data to and from Blender and 3DSMax, .PC2 is actually the native point cache format of Max. So, there you go. Blender already has support for exchanging point cache data between all 3D apps.

35

I actually use the .pc2 format for caching animation from maya to blender. Works great, and since it’s a native cache format for Maya, exports are blazing fast.

36

Indy_logic, MDD cannot I/O camera animation, also lacks other features like materials. That’s why Alembic is the standard industry format for exchange scenes.

37

For anyone interested I made some time ago a tutorial about transferring animation between blender and maya.


Of course Alembic support would be great but until then we have pc2 files and MDD.

38

Yes alembic is better and we all want it. All Indy and I are saying is that you can still incorporate blender into a mixed pipeline with existing tools and get your job done today while you wait for alembic. :slight_smile:

39

FYI - Alembic output from Blender using Octane is included in this talk:


Good times ahead indeed
40

The whole film industry is using Alembic for several reasons. The most important part of having Alembic in Blender is to put Blender into that same pipeline. In this regard other formats won’t replace Alembic no matter how capable they are.