Alembic for Unity

Unity Engine
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We are pleased to announce a Unity Alembic Importer/Exporter preview package for 2018.1. More details to follow soon.

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I can’t discover it in the package manager, also resource manager disappeared as well, shoud I switch to staging-packages in the manifest or something?

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“Announce”, not “release”.

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Right, sorry I’m so excited, I hope more formats are coming like glTF and usd

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I cant wait for glTF tbh.

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Hi everyone,

I’m Sean Low, Unity Tools Engineer and we will be having a talk about Alembic + Timeline in Unity Central(HQ building in San Francisco) during GDC. We will be showcasing ADAM film asset as example and more discussion in details.

If you’re interested, please put your name in the registration below:
Ask The Expert: Alembic + Timeline [March 21, 2018 11am-12pm]
Ask The Expert: Alembic + Timeline [March 21, 2018 4pm-5pm]

Hope to see everyone there!

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Is Alembic supported across more software than Disney/Pixar’s new format (UDC or some other acronym)?

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Hi Laurent,

Yes, Alembic is an industry-wide standard for vertex caches across animation and vfx. Prior to Alembic every studio had their own home-grown vertex cache format and maintained its own importers and exporters for each DCC. USD is still not widely used outside of a few big studios, though it is gaining ground quickly. Note that USD doesn’t replace Alembic - it actually integrates it.

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Hi everyone,

Here’s how you can preview the Alembic for Unity package that Sean just talked about at GDC:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.formats.alembic@0.1-preview/manual/index.html

It’s a preview, so don’t rely on the API and functionality staying the same in future releases. We wanted to get it out quickly to get your feedback early.

This thread is open for discussion, let us know what you think!

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Thanks everyone for joining us today! I’m glad that the presentation and demo project showed help you all to better understand how to use Alembic and setup in TImeline. Also thanks for the positive feedback during our sessions today. Hope you all have fun in creating more awesome contents using Alembic Importer! Feel free to let us know if you have any questions! :slight_smile:

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Hello Sean. Quick question about performance with alembic on Mobile. If the vertex count is fairly low (ie mobile sizes < 1000 verts) is there any performance gain/loss to using an alembic cache? Using an example of say a 30 frame animation of 1000 verts vs a skinned mesh renderer with less than 6 bones and the same animation?
(I wasn’t able to be at GDC this year - would have been great to attend).

So I guess to simplify the question further, is there any data on using an alembic cache on mobile?
Platform wise, this question would be aimed at Iphone 5s and above (so after Metal was introduced) - or the Android Equiv.

Thanks.

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Hi, thanks for your question. We haven’t done any testing at all on mobile platforms. Our efforts at the moment are focused on making Alembic available in the Unity Editor for film, VFX and animation customers. We have had internal discussions to bring some kind of compressed vertex cache to the Unity Player, but don’t have a timeline for that at the moment.

That said, we certainly don’t want to prevent anyone from experimenting! Our Alembic support is completely open-source, so if anyone wants to contribute an iOS or Android build, you are welcome to submit a pull request to the github project.

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Hi everyone,

We have a video to help you get started with the Package Manager version of the Alembic importer here.

Enjoy!

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Any likelihood of Hololens support with the Alembic Importer/Exporter preview package for 2018.1? and would the compressed vertex cache potentially work with the Hololens?

Thanks

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Sorry kteitsort but I don’t have an answer to your question at the moment, I’ll investigate with the XR team and come back as soon as I have more information.

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We are back to an old problem Again. This dos NOT recognize “Use Face Sets” So my character that has 2 materials (One for the Head and One for the Body) imports with only a Single material. I need a Fix for this A.S.A.P.!!

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Any plans for PS4/XB1 official support somewhere down the line and if so, any ETA?

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Here is my first test with it. :slight_smile:

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this issue was resolved in private messages. but I re-write the answer to make the information public.
this plugin generates submeshes based on face sets. but it doesn’t generate materials for each face sets because Alembic doesn’t have material data (so Alembic prefabs have always only one material). you need to create and assign materials in Unity.

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we can’t distribute binaries for consoles publicly because it is forbidden by license. but you can build it from the source (https://github.com/unity3d-jp/AlembicForUnity). if you have C++ experience, it will be not so difficult.
not tested for a while but I did it in the past on both PS4 and XBox One. I will re-check.