Alembic is an interchangeable

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

file format A file format is a 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 or free. Some file format ...

developed by

Sony Pictures Imageworks Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc. is a Canadian visual effects and computer animation studio headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, with an additional office on the Sony Pictures Studios lot in Culver City, California. SPI is a unit of Sony Pi ...

and

Industrial Light & Magic Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American motion picture visual effects company that was founded on May 26, 1975 by George Lucas. It is a division of the film production company Lucasfilm, which Lucas founded, and was created when he began pr ...

. It was announced at

SIGGRAPH SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference on computer graphics (CG) organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH, starting in 1974. The main conference is held in North America; SIGGRAPH Asia ...

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 polyhedral object. The faces usually consist of triangles ( triangle mesh), quadrilaterals (quads), or other simple convex p ...

es,

subdivision surface In the field of 3D computer graphics, a subdivision surface (commonly shortened to SubD surface) is a curved surface represented by the specification of a coarser polygon mesh and produced by a recursive algorithmic method. The curved surface, ...

parametric curve In mathematics, a parametric equation defines a group of quantities as functions of one or more independent variables called parameters. Parametric equations are commonly used to express the coordinates of the points that make up a geometric obj ...

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

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