Alembic for Softimage 1.0

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Alembic PluginAuthor: Helge Mathee
Basic Alembic exporter for Softimage (Alembic is a compressed streaming format for baked mesh animations which is becoming popular in bigger pipelines).

From Helge's comments, this plugin appears to be custom-taiailored to his specific project needs and seems not ready to use »out of the box«. But sourcecode is available for custom development from the google code page. Mercurial versioning is required for downloading.

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Memag
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Alembic for Softimage 1.0

Post by Memag » 08 Sep 2011, 15:01

Helge Mathee shows Alembic for SI 1.0



Source code

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dwigfor
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Re: Alembic for Softimage 1.0

Post by dwigfor » 08 Sep 2011, 16:19

Thanks, Helge! It's amazing what you make for us!

Here's a video from siggraph about Alembic. Some very impressive real world numbers!


Hopefully they'll release a nice little icon for us. :ymblushing:

-Dave

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TwinSnakes007
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Re: Alembic for Softimage 1.0

Post by TwinSnakes007 » 08 Sep 2011, 20:30

Sweet. So, I wonder can render engines adopt this format as well?

Edit: Nevermind, I watched the second video and Arnold, Modo, Katana support is in the works.

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Hirazi Blue
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Re: Alembic for Softimage 1.0

Post by Hirazi Blue » 09 Sep 2011, 20:33

I hope I'm wrong but I would imagine this not to be for the faint-at-heart as it was apparently written for a specific project/pipeline. On the Mailing List Helge Mathee commented this release with the following statement
I needed a basic alembic exporter, which I have now, so for me the task is finished,
but it is in no way production ready.
(Quoted from here)
No small feat nonetheless, obviously... :-bd

So, now the big question: did anyone here already successfully compile this exporter?
(Not that I personally need it, BTW, just wondering.)
Stay safe, sane & healthy!

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Mathaeus
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Re: Alembic for Softimage 1.0

Post by Mathaeus » 09 Sep 2011, 22:05

IMO, point-cache systems are really nice solution for any production.
It's simple and clean solution, you just get animated model, no need to know almost anything about another 3d app.
IMHO it will be interesting how Alembic will be accepted in 3dsMax community, as this culture seems to be immune to high-end fanboyism (cool in-house tools in big facilities, Siggraph papers, 'used by...', so on). If the tool isn't available for everyone, it is ignored.
Afaik, there is no Alembic for Max, yet.

calmasacow
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Re: Alembic for Softimage 1.0

Post by calmasacow » 13 Sep 2011, 21:38

isnt it in the upcoming SAP releases for Maya and Max?

though I do find it hilarious that Matthew can rip this out so quickly and yet the Softimage could not be bothered to get it in the SAP release so that Alembic transfers between SI and Maya could be possible.

oglu
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Re: Alembic for Softimage 1.0

Post by oglu » 14 Sep 2011, 09:40

only maya has native alembic support...

Bellsey
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Re: Alembic for Softimage 1.0

Post by Bellsey » 14 Sep 2011, 12:25

At present, Alembic will only appear in the Maya 2012 Subs Advantage Pack, no Max or Softimage.

It's not a case of the teams not being bothered but more priority and collaboration. As the guys said in their presentation, Alembic was only announced at last years Siggraph and since then it's been rewritten to get them to this point now. It can be tricky to try and implement something across three seperate packages whilst it is still being developed and updated. We would need to make sure the cross package compatability is there and that is not a 5min job.
Taken into account the joint effort behind it and that many of film vfx studios use Maya at the core of their pipelines, it makes sense to me for Maya to be at the front of our Alembic support, which I then hope can be rolled out into the other packages as well.
Helge was able to get something started but as he admits himself, he needed something quick and basic, but it's far from production ready.

luceric
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Re: Alembic for Softimage 1.0

Post by luceric » 14 Sep 2011, 16:11

fyi: Maya SAP bundles the Maya plug-in from the alembic web site. What ADSK did was port the Alembic code to Windows, because it was just made for Maya on Linux. Alembic was made for film pipeline to bake down animation and move the data to the next step in the pipeline, for example to load in houdini as obstacles or painting-texturing-lighting. Maya doesn't support alembic for particles, btw.
TwinSnakes007 wrote:Sweet. So, I wonder can render engines adopt this format as well?
Edit: Nevermind, I watched the second video and Arnold, Modo, Katana support is in the works.
Alembic doesn't support any materials or shader information currently, the Arnold plug-in is for use with the Kataka shader only, afaik. Probably loads of custom attributes gets all of that to work. With alembic just out-of-the-box, you just get geometry caching, like if you were to use an .obj file sequence.

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redmotion
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Re: Alembic for Softimage 1.0

Post by redmotion » 21 Nov 2013, 00:54

Seems that Octane Render has been rebuilt from the ground up to better support animation and the alembic format:

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=36971

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