Alembic 1.0, the open source project jointly developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks and Lucasfilm, has been released to the public. Alembic is a computer graphics interchange format that focuses on efficiently storing and sharing animation and visual effects scenes across multiple software applications. It was designed to handle massive animation data sets and includes automatic data de-duplication. The software automatically recognizes repeated shapes in complicated geometry and only writes a single instance to disk. This makes Alembic 1.0 use dramatically less disk space without requiring any extra steps on the part of the user and can improve both write and read performance as well.
In the case of hero deforming humanoid characters, including hair, shot caches have been reduced by more than 70%. For complex, deeply hierarchical and mostly rigid assets like the Transformers characters, tests have shown cache reduction in the order of 98%.
The file format is receiving wide attention and support from industry companies, such as Autodesk, The Foundry, Luxology and Side Effects Software. More information at Alembic’s site.
Interesting, but the full blown press release is successfully camouflaging deep information 🙂 There seem to be plugins for Maya, Houdini, Arnold and Prman – would be good to know from their users if this is only useful for big studios or if it could be a helpful addition to Point Oven or FBX Pointcaches…