As some of you may know, I’m currently working on a basic Alembic implementation for Blender 2.78. I’m opening this thread to hopefully gather some test and feedback through this forum. This implementation is primarily for character animation, which should include hair and fur.
UPDATE: this was merged in master and should be available in the latest nightly builds.
Bugs should be handled through the bug tracker, but can be reported/handled here as well.
Current list of known bugs and to-dos (as of August the 10th):
Bugs:
Sintel IK has bugs, might be an export issue. (Alembic does not really take care of armatures and baked vertices data is correct, so low priority).
To-dos (for future work on this): - allow for custom axis for import/export
@pitiwazou, you have a lot of knowledge and would be great if you could make a correct Linux installation on disk
And I’m not just talking about testing this build, but also about your addons and other things.
i cant get it to work on ubuntu 16.04.
First it needs shared library liboslcomp.so and when i installed the package and try again to open from terminal I get “Illegal instruction (core dumped)”. I had the same problem with the previous version you had but then it was also other libraries missing.
I was on a live CD and if I try to install it directly that doesn’t work, linux don’t like me, it’s always like that, so I will wait for a windows build !
I just checked out the branch and compiled, I may have missed some configuration option. Will check and recompile in two hours.
Edit: Yes, compiled with alembic off…
Edit again: In mac it does not find the library. I see CMakeLists.txt tries to find alembic around line 320 but I believe it should do it later on platform specific code after line 890 and set the static libs accordingly.
No, apparently it is required for some obscure reason. Though, I don’t know much about that area, I just compiled everything and decided to deal with the details later
HDF5 is the format used by the early releases of Alembic, but has since been replaced by Alembic’s own archive format Ogawa. The only reason for HDF5 is legacy support (old files, or old software).
I personally think Blender should take a stance and not use HDF5, primarily to cut down on dependencies and maintenance. That means you won’t be able to open the classic Alembic octopus for example, and you may have to request “Can you send that file again, saved as Ogawa” if someone you work with saved using HDF5 (maybe out of habit).
That may be too much to ask, so it is very important that you who use and share Alembic files regularly with other studios/freelancers chime in here. You can use Alembic cli tools such as ‘abcinfo’ (included with Houdini) to see what archive the file uses.