Hi all,

These days I'm getting to try Alembic to see what's the advantages over FBX but I'm already stuck with one little disadvantage (or myself unable to sort it out otherwise) .. Alembix OBJ doesn't have any input, or parameter to handle it, that would allow me to, for example, hook it up to a “globalScale” Null where I scale my whole scene if needed … any hint on how to archive this or should I post a RFE?

thanks!

One quick suggestion is to just drop it inside of a subnet and transform and scale that.

Another suggestion is to just modify the Alembic Object's asset and re-expose the xform parms.

Wolfwood
One quick suggestion is to just drop it inside of a subnet and transform and scale that.

Another suggestion is to just modify the Alembic Object's asset and re-expose the xform parms.

yeah I thought about that… although the Alembic I'm playing with has hundred of objects…

hmm.. I'll try the re-expose suggestion though! thanks didn't think about it.

sum][one
yeah I thought about that… although the Alembic I'm playing with has hundred of objects…

Ya tell me about it. Some of the assets we are passing around have thousands of objects which bog Houdini down to no end. There are tricks like flattening the hierarchy for static transforms, but then if you want to maintain a 1 to 1 with original source you can't do that.

A lot depends on if your data has to do a round trip or not. Our Alembic Archive node has like 7 different “import modes” on it depending on your task.

We have the original mode, a CHOP method which imports the xforms into chops, then the alembic objects read the xform data from CHOPs. This saves from having to look up xforms in the .abc file. We also have a Alembic Xform's SOP which builds a point cloud of all the objects xforms, handy for instancing. etc etc.

We are currently in our first big production with Alembic, and so far its been pretty awesome.