The Alembic Exporter!!!

Comments

• Richard Haseltine Posts: 108,149

  June 2016

  Alembic is essentially an aniamtion format - for still OBJ will do everything that Alembic will do, as far as I recall. The point of Alembic is that it takes the vertex changes over time so there's no need for rigging or morphs to be transferred; the down side is that it is then not practical to edit the aniamtion in the destination application as there are just vertex movements wit no bones to adjust.
• wolf359 Posts: 3,934

  June 2016

  Hi the MDD exporter from animate2 does the same thing(point level animation of static mesh). If you are not a person wanting to render animated Daz figures in other programs you have no need for these export functions.
• smaker1 Posts: 281

  June 2016

  Hello,

  I use Alembic exporter for still renders when I want motion blur. I find the results more realists than with postwork (but I'm not a postwork specialist!) . The only bad point is that materials are not imported automatically like obj exports.
• wolf359 Posts: 3,934

  June 2016 edited June 2016

  smaker1 said:

  Hello,

  I use Alembic exporter for still renders when I want motion blur. I find the results more realists than with postwork (but I'm not a postwork specialist!) . The only bad point is that materials are not imported automatically like obj exports.

  This is a shortcoming of the receiving applications . Obj importer. A proper Obj importer will have a requester dialogue asking for the location of the image maps referenced in the mtl file. I use a full featured third party importer for Maxon C4D. And never have any texture issues with my animated Genesis figures that I render in C4D using the MDD method I have read other threads about Alembic poor texture handling making me wonder why anyone would buy/use it.

  Post edited by wolf359 on June 2016
• smaker1 Posts: 281

  June 2016

  Thanks Wolf

  I don't have Animate2 :-( and didn't know the MDD format. As I render in Octane without plug-in I only have access to obj, abc and vdb import. So that's the only way I find to get motion blur for some render.
• algovincian Posts: 2,664

  June 2016

  I think that material conversion is so different going from one application to another (and one render engine to another) that it makes no sense to try to include it at all, and I have no issue with this. IMHO, I'm fine with materials having to be setup natively, with the aid of custom proprietary scripts. Now only if Blender would ever come out with an alembic importer!

  The alembic exporter is one of the more pricey plugins, but I purchased it in order to preotect my larger investment in DAZ content - ensuring that I could get the geometry out of DAZ and into other programs in the future.

  - Greg
• wolf359 Posts: 3,934

  June 2016

  algovincian said:

  I think that material conversion is so different going from one application to another (and one render engine to another) that it makes no sense to try to include it at all, and I have no issue with this. IMHO, I'm fine with materials having to be setup natively, with the aid of custom proprietary scripts. Now only if Blender would ever come out with an alembic importer!

  The alembic exporter is one of the more pricey plugins, but I purchased it in order to preotect my larger investment in DAZ content - ensuring that I could get the geometry out of DAZ and into other programs in the future.

  - Greg

  It depends on how you are using those assets in other programs. As animator I need to have my digital actors setup in C4D textured and ready to render. All of my character motion is created on a different computer Where I have Iclone pro, Endorphin,& Daz studio installed. I generate motion data that is dropped on a server to be accessed by my lit&textured actors. Redoing the materials for each shot is not an acceptable workflow which why using MDD data is the better option for us digital filmmakers. Not to mention cost of the full version of aniMate2 compared to the alembic option.