Alembic format in Blender

I just saw these two videos about an Alembic exporter for Blender:


I cannot find any more information about this but these videos are quite new. Anyone knows about this project?

I would like to know about this also. Alembic import/export is very important for Blender.

it’s only Output that works AFAIK. Agree it’s super important. And it’s super important it’s done right so Input to blender can stream from an .abc file.

When it’s fully working blender (we) can have a chance to integrate in pipelines so easy. For smaller studios blender can do alot of animation, texturing, modeling, fluid sim! and now easy physics sims.

I would love too see alembic as a topic for a near-future release of blender. Otherwise GSoC is coming up!

http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/alembic-support-in-blender-is-a-work-in-progress

Bao2, thanks for the links but those ones are quite old (2011) while the videos I posted are 2 days old, so I’m thinking that we might have something new going on.

a.s.: not sure why multiple general-alembic-threads exist

, but here it is my thought posted yesterday in this same section :

=== pasted from the other thread ==============================

hi ! everyeone ,

wd be great to see this thing back !

even in a basic starting form , this thing wd help me a lot ( i often jump from Houdini to Blender ) .

a good and solid start for me means ;

– exporting polygonal meshes with material groups

– items stored in hierarchy trees and containing their basic transform channels ( animations )

– importing mesh deformations and storing it as blender cache format , shdnt be that hard ( imho ) .

–later … NURBs wd remove a lot of other headaches … =)

======================================================

.cheers

Ton has recently stated on twitter that there are 2 devs working on it. I would imagine there would be some sort of integration with the new mesh cache modifier for individual meshes, but not sure how this would work at the scene level. We just need to be patient :slight_smile:

Basic I/O will be easy

is there any addon to test a basic export ?

Looks like this thread has been revived, so it would now be a good time to note that Lukas Tonne has been working on point cache export based on the Alembic format (also mentioned in the Dec 1st Sunday Meeting Minutes).
http://developer.blender.org/T37578

For those who have been pining for news, the wait is over.

If/when Alembic I/O is reality in Blender, I will finally have my ideal cross platform workflow of combining Blender and Houdini in a seamless 3D pipeline. Good times ahead!

I guess its time for me to post another post-mortem on a recent commercial project done in Blender :), since it touches on a few recent developments.

With alembic we could combine blender with lot of softwares, Guerilla, nuke, houdiny, Max, Maya…

It will be really great for artist who works on big productions.

Alembic is so important that it can take Blender to the next level.

I agree, great times ahead ^^

It’s a shame we cannot have this standard format in Blender, these days new render engines are coming out such as Guerilla Render and Clarisse IFX that allows Alembic but we cannot use these ones because we don’t have this format in Blender, also would be nice for exchange data from Blender to Maya, 3ds, Softimage and in the opposite way.

Well Sam, it’s being worked on, so we can and will have this format in Blender sometimes in the next months.

Great news, thanks Thomas. This will really make Blender to take more serious in the industry. One step forward for sure.

In the next 12 months or less ? ^^

It is being actively worked on and code is up on github – https://github.com/lukastoenne/blender/commits/pointcache

if you help out coding it will get in to the trunk faster.

Any news? thx.