Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 26, 2013. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The open-source Alembic project makes it easier to share even very large animation and VFX scenes between different software packages. Release 1.5 adds multi-threading support, which is intended to deliver a significant performance improvement.
According to SPI Chief Technology Officer Rob Bredow, the data sets are substantially smaller overall and therefore faster to read and write. ILM’s Head of Technology Paul Ryan says Alembic was used on almost every project of recent years, from "Avengers" to "Pacific Rim". "The ability to move scenes with large amounts of data back and forth between the different packages through Alembic has become an indispensable part of the ILM pipeline," Paul Ryan assures.
The architecture was substantially changed for multi-threading support. Another feature is support for hierarchical deduplications (instancing) within a file.
One of the ILM projects whose 1,600 VFX shots could be handled with Alembic is "Pacific Rim". You will find an article about this project in an upcoming DP issue.
More information about Sony Picture Imageworks is available here.
Image: Sony Pictures Imageworks
