Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 29, 2010. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Alembic is a so-called “Graphics Interchange Format” particularly suited to compressing and storing animation data – across software boundaries. Its development has placed particular emphasis on storing large to very large quantities of data, as often accumulate in an animation workflow.
At the beginning of the year, Sony and ILM joined forces to avoid redundant software development: both wanted a way to pass animation data between locations, workflow stages and software packages. In principle, the format works through converters that abstract the actual data from proprietary formats and save it in an interchange format – in the next step, the geometry is then “unpacked” again into the desired software package and processed there.
Companies including Autodesk, The Foundry, Luxology, Pixar and NVIDIA have already expressed interest in the project.
Further links:
- Alembic
