Hi all, I've started a few days ago, a new Blender branch, to add Alembic support. I think Alembic is a very important file format for the future. It's already supported in Maya, Nuke, Houdini, Softimage, Renderman, ... It's small, very efficient for baking any type of animation and fast to read. It's really great.
I already have a basic exporter, similar to the Collada one, written in C++. It exports object hierarchies, meshes with animated modifiers, normals, uvs and also cameras. I posted some screenshots here: http://ramencomp.blogspot.com For the import part, I was thinking about using python drivers for object transforms and a new modifier for the geometry animation. I added a bpy.alembic module and ported the code from Alembic's Houdini plugin. I can use the functions in bpy.alembic in drivers, to get the data from the archive. I haven't started the modifier yet. Everything is optional, using a CMake option (WITH_ALEMBIC). Alembic depends on Boost, OpenEXR's Imath ( both already being used in blender) and also HDF5 (new) There are other possible uses of Alembic inside Blender, like replacing the fluid and particle caches with Alembic files, that could also be interesting. Links: project page: http://www.alembic.io siggraph presentation: http://youtu.be/I__MeR8jsFk Thank you! Est. _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
