Industrial Light and Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks have just released
(7/27/10) an alpha version
of Alembic, a co-developed open source project focussed on creating an
interchange format for storing
and sharing animation and visual effects. Alembic will allow Sony Picutures
Image Works and ILM to
create interchangeable and customisable pipelines for animation creation.
Alembic is an open computer graphics interchange framework. Alembic distills
complex, animated,
scenes into non-procedural, application-independent, baked geometric results.
This
distillation of
scenes into baked geometry is exactly analogous to the distillation of
lighting
and rendering scenes
into rendered image data.
The project involves creating a format that handles the massive data sets that
represent animated
scenes, distilled from the animation generation processes used by the
animators, but not the
computations or dependencies that would be used to create final rendered
scenes. The developers
say Alembic could be used, for example, to pass creature animations to a
clothing or flesh simulator,
or a physics simulator and save the results, ready for lighting and rendering.
Alembic Would Be Used...
* To bake the results of an animated scene for hand-off to lighting &
rendering
* To hand off an animated creature for cloth or flesh simulation
* To store the results of a cloth or flesh simulation for use in
lighting &
rendering
* To hand off animated geometry to a physical simulation engine
* To store the results of a physical simulation engine for use in
lighting &
rendering
The alpha release of Alembic is incomplete, as it lacks an API for plug-ins
and
extensions.
The two companies plan to work together to remedy that soon, finalising the
API
and adding
documentation, code samples and other resources.
references and direct quotes from:
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Sony-and-ILM-release-Alembic-an-open-source-graphics-interchange-format-1046729.html
http://code.google.com/p/alembic/
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