I have fixed one issue with normals which occurs when the Alembic archive does not contain normals, but the one you describe still exists, and I’m aware of it. The “Smooth Normals” flag also gets lost when a new mesh is created. I’ll see what I can do.
It does control the scale of the object, but it only affects the object if a Transform Cache constraint is added to it. I have changed the range of the slider from 0.0 - 1.0 to 0.0001 - 1000.0, and added the information about the Transform Cache constraint in the tooltip. This value is also set automatically to whatever value is set in the Scale property of the import operator.
Request: At the bottom of the Alembic modifier there is a"Object:" field with a path to the object in the Alembic file. Could this actually be a drop down list with all the objects in the file so you could manually change what object it is at will? One of the issues I keep running into with Alembic and our Pipeline is that we export a scene into 3DSMax and start working on Materials and lighting. Then, at some point something gets added to the scene. The next time we open the scene, the Alembic gets read but the object is still not there. In one case we discovered that the eyes of some characters needed to be separate objects from the main mesh. We made the change but When the TD opened her scene, the eyes where missing. The TD then had to re-import the new Alembic blowing away all the surfacing work she had done just so she could get the new eyes. Luckily she hadn’t gotten that far.
I remember another developer (Campbell actually) mentioning this to me a few weeks ago but I forgot about it. I just implemented this, so test it and report any bugs :).
Actually another idea is to have a function that checks to see if there have been any objects added to the Alembic since you last opened your scene and ask you if you’d like to add the new data. But I would still like to have the option of manually re-pathing objects.
I added a refresh operator to reload the archive and update the paths list, similar to the refresh operator in the Script Node in Cycles. Your idea is interesting but might require a different implementation; though I’ll try to keep it in mind and see how it could be done.
Good to know :).
Is there any possibility that RF abc stores both? And when importing some kind of filter is needed?
No. HDF5/Ogawa are the compression of the file, and for any file format only one compression is used, otherwise you would need to duplicate the data for the same number of times as the number of compression types.
EDIT: updated first post with current list of known issues and to-dos.
I asked earlier in the thread about dropping HDF5, and I’m glad to see the decision Kevin made. At this stage I think it is fair to ask partners to (re)send files in Ogawa compression, and even RealFlow uses it now (also in 2013, or only in 2015? In any case, the onus shouldn’t be on Blender to read outdated files).
Thanks for a hard work guys. I downloaded the latest windows build. It crashes when i add a curve and click with right mouse button on the option pointed with red arrow on the screenshot.
There is a new but harmless issue when compiling, something interfering with an if(APPLE) statement somewhere, but i could not find it ad hoc, so pushed the build and solve this tonight.
EDIT: Found and fixed it. Was own mistake adding the needed boost include for osx wrong way. :o
Updated my build just to be sure.
The windows build with hash f0cdc1f is ready. Windows takes a long time to build (osx and linux are much, much faster), so I will not build another until tomorrow.
