Do the plans for this include importing as well as exporting? It would be great to be able to import a particle system from houdini, or an animated mesh from maya.
Not for now. I think a good exporter is what most people need.
After the exporter, I’d like to add a vertex cache modifier that can
read mdd, pc2, cortex caches, … and apply them to meshes on the fly,
instead of reading all the animation and creating shape keys.
Updated build: http://graphicall.org/625
More options for the exporter, bug fixes,
subdivision surfaces creases, …
Please test it.
Thanks for the update! I’ll try to test as soon as I can. That vertex cache modifier sounds fantastic, btw. Being able to get animated characters and sims from Maya to blender is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now. This would allow characters, ncloth sims, etc to be rendered in blender. I remember a long time ago there was a plugin that allowed particle data to export from maya to Lightwave and it worked in production. It allowed a maya particle sim to be rendered with hypervoxels. Would this vertex cache modifier allow something like that as well?
The vertex cache would work only with animated meshes that doesn’t change topology.
Probably you can do it right now, with cortex. Exporting cob meshes from maya and a
fio attribute cache. There’s a cob importer for Blender in the build and using a python
frame change callback to read the fio and updating the object vertices.
Updated build: http://graphicall.org/625
Frame relative sampling, improved camera export,
more options, bug fixes, …
Please test it.
Any chance of a win or mac build?
Thanks!
Thanks for working on this Est777!
In your latest updated build, ‘libOpenImageIO.so.0.11’ is missing though…
I’m just uploading build 5. I couldn’t fit openimageio and the other image libs in the package
because of the 50 Mb limit. Instead I disabled Cycles.
I can only make linux build myself. I don’t have osx or windows.
A patch to add the Alembic exporter is in the Devel dir, inside the package.
It should be platform independent and easy to merge.
As far as I know, Cortex does not build on Windows.
hi Est777
couldn’t get cmake to run;
Error on line 1595 info_cgf_option(WITH_ALEMBIC)
Still can’t get to enable Alembic export/import from both scons and cmake build. What options should I enable to get alembic to show up in my export/import menu list?
Also, beside hdf5, is there any other library that has to be installed?
TIA.
The branch is export only. There are no plans for import.
The exporter only builds with CMake.
The error is probably because you don’t have the alembic libs.
You need boost ( is already used on cycles), hdf5 and the alembic libraries.
successfully compiled your Alembic branch by manually providing the Alembic paths to the cmake.
Many thanks, really appreciate it.
ANy updates on this? It would be great to have that in Trunk sometimes, do you still develop it Est777?
nvm, misposted.
That’s a genuine shame. An importer would be very useful for integrating blender into a production pipeline.
I’m keeping the exporter in sync with blender’s SVN trunk but I didn’t
add new features recently. I’m not sure if I have the time to properly maintain it.
I can help if someone wants to adopt this branch. I think the code is clear, well
commented, easy to extend and already quite complete.
It’s also a good project to get started developing Blender.
An Alembic importer, well done, will require an important number of changes in Blender.
Probably extending the existing library system to handle .abc files in addition to .blend files would
be the way to go. I don’t have enough Blender coding experience to do it and I also think that
projects that affects Blender’s architecture are best done by Blender’s developers.
The author of the Ramen compositor is working on an Alembic exporter for blender: http://ramencomp.blogspot.com/ … in fact it looks like there’s already a build on graphicall: http://graphicall.org/625
wups…old news…sry
he 
est777 is the ramen compositing dev. 
Just wanted to bump this thread up again as missing Alembic support (in my case it’s mainly the IMport that’s missing!) is what keeps us from migrating more stuff to Blender.
Are there any updates? Alembic is industry standard and opensource, it’s the OpenEXR of 3D data, so Blender kind of “has to have it!” 