Alembic 1.1.0
Aug 06, 2012 by CGP Staff
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New features in the open interchange format that focuses on efficiently storing and sharing animation and scenes across multiple software include:
– AbcCollections – Alembic now supports the concept of a collection. Sometimes people refer to collections as “groups” or “object sets” (as in Maya).
– AbcMaterial – Alembic now supports the concept of a material. This is done by defining a schema for a material definition which can act as a standalone object or as supplemental data attached to another object.
– AbcLight – Alembic now supports the concept of a light. Light objects are distinct objects that contain both a camera and a material schema.
– Python bindings -the Alembic team has finally completed the Python bindings to allow scripters to access the full power of the Alembic C++ API.
– Performance optimization – for some caches, a great deal of time was being spent in HDF5 functions that access groups and attributes by name. Alembic now lets you optionally write a side car data structure within the HDF5 file that maps the HDF5 hierarchy to HDF5 object references which results in lookups that are much faster. You pay the price of a slight disk size increase and memory footprint.
More on the Alembic project’s website.
– AbcCollections – Alembic now supports the concept of a collection. Sometimes people refer to collections as “groups” or “object sets” (as in Maya).
– AbcMaterial – Alembic now supports the concept of a material. This is done by defining a schema for a material definition which can act as a standalone object or as supplemental data attached to another object.
– AbcLight – Alembic now supports the concept of a light. Light objects are distinct objects that contain both a camera and a material schema.
– Python bindings -the Alembic team has finally completed the Python bindings to allow scripters to access the full power of the Alembic C++ API.
– Performance optimization – for some caches, a great deal of time was being spent in HDF5 functions that access groups and attributes by name. Alembic now lets you optionally write a side car data structure within the HDF5 file that maps the HDF5 hierarchy to HDF5 object references which results in lookups that are much faster. You pay the price of a slight disk size increase and memory footprint.
More on the Alembic project’s website.