[Bf-committers] Alembic integration

[Jeroen Hoolmans]

Hey guys,

I'm fairly new to the Blender codebase, but I am really interested in getting Alembic into Blender as a personal project. More information at alembic.io
So far I got Alembic compiled on my OSX system, haven't tried windows or linux.

Some things that I noticed right away:

- OpenEXR's dependency ilmBase is in common with Alembic, however it has be upgraded to 1.0.3 (not sure what version is currently included).
- It brings HDF5 as a dependency.
- Boost 1.51.0 breaks a test of Alembic (no big deal though), Alembic was tested with 1.44 by the developers.


I'd like to talk about the integration in Blender. Erwin94 (sorry I don't know your real name) suggested to start with extending the mesh cache modifier. Note that Alembic is not a pure Geometry cache format, it can cache the entire scene inside a single file, including lights, camera's, curves, nurbssurfaces and even custom data. 

So I'm looking for a more general solution for integrating. 

--Jeroen