Alembic is an interchangeable

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. ...

file format A file format is a Computer standard, standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary format, pr ...

developed by

Sony Pictures Imageworks Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc. (simply known as Imageworks) is a visual effects and computer animation studio headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia and Montreal, Quebec, with an additional office on the Sony Pictures Studios lot in Culver C ...

and

Industrial Light & Magic Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American Film, motion picture visual effects, computer animation and stereo conversion digital studio founded by George Lucas on May 26, 1975. It is a division of the film production company Lucasfilm, which Lu ...

. It was announced at

SIGGRAPH SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference centered around computer graphics organized by ACM, starting in 1974 in Boulder, CO. The main conference has always been held in North ...

2011, and has been widely adopted across the industry by visual effects and animation professionals. Its primary focus is the efficient interchange of animated geometry (models) between different groups working on the same shots or same assets, possibly using different applications. Often different departments in the same company or different studios are working on the same projects. Alembic supports the common geometric representations used in the industry, including

polygon mesh In 3D computer graphics and solid modeling, a polygon mesh is a collection of , s and s that defines the shape of a polyhedron, polyhedral object's surface. It simplifies Rendering (computer graphics), rendering, as in a wire-frame model. The fac ...

es,

subdivision surface In the field of 3D computer graphics, a subdivision surface (commonly shortened to SubD surface or Subsurf) is a curved Computer representation of surfaces, surface represented by the specification of a coarser polygon mesh and produced by a re ...

parametric curve In mathematics, a parametric equation expresses several quantities, such as the coordinates of a point (mathematics), point, as Function (mathematics), functions of one or several variable (mathematics), variables called parameters. In the case ...

NURBS Non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS) is a mathematical model using basis splines (B-splines) that is commonly used in computer graphics for representing curves and surfaces. It offers great flexibility and precision for handling both analy ...

patches and particles. Alembic also has support for transform hierarchies and cameras. With the latest version comes initial support for materials and lights as well. Alembic specifically is not focused on storing the complex dependency graphs of procedural tools but instead stores the "baked" results by sampling the model data at different points along an animated scene's timeline.

Tools which support Alembic

Tools with native support

Plugins

References

External links