Introduction to Alembic

For the past 10 years, Alembics have been powering production pipelines around the world.
It is the industry-standard format supported by dozens of mainstream 3d software.
By the end of this video, you will be able to harness the “power of alembics” in your personal or professional CG work. In Fact, alembics enables you to build your own DIY CG pipeline at home round-tripping data between the software of your choice.
For that we will start with basics and learn :
1. What are Object Hierarchies and how software such as Maya, Blender, C4D, Houdini, and Clarisse represent them.
2. We will learn the Difference between Transforming and Deforming animation?
3. Go over Alembic’s strengths and limitations.
4. As a bonus we will fire up Houdini. Setup a simple scene, animate and export a transforming cache for shading and rendering in Blender, C4D, and Maya-Arnold.

[@pulkitc329]

Thanks Mathur ji

[@sudhirverma89]

This is amazing and straight to the point 🤘 . really liked the way you have packed the content with visuals and clear easy to understand narrations. Looking forward to the series 😃

[@vfxacademy3575]

Thank you!

[@sonnyobrien]

WOW AMAZING TUTORIAL KEEP TEACHING 10/10

[@avishjohn12]

Happy to learn from you once again after over 6 yrs! :-)

[@vfxacademy3575]

Thank you for the kind words. Glad to hear from you after so long.

[@simondawa3318]

Great simple explanation 👍

[@kappakoi]

✨✨as calm, cool, collective and informative you are, explaining the complex in a simple manner. May you efforts flourish!!! BIG thanks from me!!!😌🙃😀🙃

[@ModelWhatYouSee]

Really good video. I'm in a bit of a pinch and I need to be able to export from Houdini with Maya groups/naming structure. Anything you could point me to to help? I'm sure it's just a small bit of VEX but I can't figure it out. Thanks for any help!

[@naveensharma-hw5gf]

Oh my god Gaurav, it is really amazing Keep going

[@vfxacademy3575]

Thanks Naveen! You are one of the inspiration :)

[@harrisonjustis9977]

absolutely quality video thanks man

[@khedkarsanto]

Very nicely presented

[@vfxacademy3575]

Thank you!

[@brijeshjohar5969]

Very well explained 👌

[@vfxacademy3575]

Thank you, Sir :)

[@persicapicardo]

Amazing explanation , thank you for this video😇

[@vfxacademy3575]

Welcome :) .

[@shiben101]

The presentation is so good! 🙏❤️👌

[@vfxacademy3575]

Thank you :)

[@catalinaacevedopacheco]

thank you!

[@puneetmathur1590]

Excellent presentation 🙏

[@vfxacademy3575]

Thanks a lot

[@vietcyco5726]

thank !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[@lewistaylorFX]

I wouldn't list not being able to store shaders, texures, or rigs as a limitation. It was never intended to be anything but what it is, a point cache storage format.

[@monkey4102]

I think that is the definition of a limitation. There are other formats that are similar, that can do that. So when we compare them, some have limitations compared to others. What's the problem? STLs were not intended to store a lot of things, OBJ can store a little more than STLs and thus, wouldn't we say that the STL format has some limitations?

[@lewistaylorFX]

@@monkey4102 because by design alembic is a baked point cache format. It is not a limitation when you are aligning functions to something it was never intended for. As an example, a limitation of a car is that it can’t fly?

[@lewistaylorFX]

@@vincestevenson9430what are you two even on about? I pointed out something simple. Alembic was by design only meant for being a baked data format of geometric data, polygons, curves, points, and by design cameras. Comparing it to a format that by design is meant to encapsulate more data types and functions is not helpful, and pointing out a limitation of alembic that it was never meant to be able to do makes no sense. I thought the car flying examples illustrated that, but I guess not? Maybe what I should have done, is explain that you could preface your bit with, "here's alembic, it was only designed to do this, here's USD, it extends beyond geometric data storage." Does that clear it up, or would you prefer to keep going over it? Great work mentioning trying to bore yourself to sleep by pouring over my observation, not sure what you are trying to attain there. But since I'm also wanting to bore myself to sleep, I'll address your observation about flying cars and bumblebees. The reason you don't assign a car's inability to fly as a limitation, is because guess what? If you do, that means you can list it's inability to be a banana as a limitation. I'm not sure if you work in Computer Graphics, but when we talk about limitations we mean that something supports feature or function X - with or without limitations, not that it has a limitation of not being able to do something it wasn't designed to do. That is what my original comment was about, that alembic fully supports the types it does and nothing more, with certain limitations of data in those types.