Alembic

Tools
1

http://www.alembic.io/index.html

Youtube-Press-Conference:

That’s pretty nice stuff. Altough I’d like to see some videos actually running alembic.

What’s does this mean for the future:

  • Point-cash-file for facial animation?
  • Whole character animation as a point-cache-file?

For the last point I guess it will be hard to blend animation assets in contrast to do it the procedural way with a realtime-skeleton.

Cinematics or cutscenes will be a good candidate using this technique.

What do you think?

2

Alembic has been pretty good to me so far. We’re slowly trying to move and more and of the pipeline to use that instead of bgeos.
Don’t know how much impact it will have on the game pipelines though because ultimately the size of cache files makes it unfit to use in real-time environment.

3

Interesting discussion/debate of some of the choices in developing alembic going on at the alembic google group:
http://groups.google.com/group/alembic-discussion/browse_thread/thread/65a724bce60b1a6d

4

[QUOTE=ShadowM8;14150]Alembic has been pretty good to me so far. We’re slowly trying to move and more and of the pipeline to use that instead of bgeos.
Don’t know how much impact it will have on the game pipelines though because ultimately the size of cache files makes it unfit to use in real-time environment.[/QUOTE]

Maybe not on the runtime side but I’ve found it a great alternative for dealing with hub style environments where you’ve got hundreds of files feeding into one massive file. Allows me to just load cached versions and switch out to the real geo before export.

5

http://demos.fabric-engine.com/

Examples of alembic use in a realtime web engine. Pretty cool.