[Bf-committers] Alembic streaming

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

You probably skip a step here; what do you (we) want to have alembic for in the first place?

To me it seems we would need it for:

- realtime playback of cached (baked) characters
- smoke, fluid, cloth sims
- general point cloud caches

All these have a relationship with something in Blender, and can thus live or work within that context as well.

If you consider to only use Alembic as import format it's barely interesting...

-Ton-

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
Blender Institute   Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam   The Netherlands

On 10 Sep, 2012, at 12:20, Jeroen Bakker wrote:

> Hi all!
> 
> I am looking into realizing Alembic support in Blender. The biggest 
> issue on this topic is the Alembic streaming.
> Alembic is not a standard importer/exporter, but can be used as a 
> read-only cache file.
> 
> My ideas are to use a placeholder (like an empty) and parent all objects 
> that are inside the alembic archive. On frame change the data of the 
> objects will be refreshed. I think that in the current architecture this 
> is the most doable thing, but it has some drawbacks.
> 
> The objects are not read-only, they can be edited, but on a frame change 
> they will be refreshed. We can make the child objects not selectable in 
> the 3d editor, but when doing simulations you need to be able to select one.
> 
> Are there other ideas to handle this issue?
> 
> Greetings,
> Jeroen
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