Content Comparison

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The Alembic scene format (is an industry standard format developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks and Lucasfilm) is and Lucasfilm and released in 2011 that represents a very efficient way to store , and reference geometry, even if it's animated. The beauty of this is that the Alembic content will simply be referenced in the Maxwell scene. Instead of overloading your computer's memory and writing huge temporary files across the network for each frame when rendering, a simple path can be embedded into the Maxwell scene, resulting in lighter files which are easier to handle and transfer over a network.

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With the Alembic native support, Maxwell will recognize the materials of the exported .abc file and will automatically assign each material to each single face if they already exists in the scene. Otherwise it will create the materials list given in the .abc file if they were missing in the scene. 

In Maxwell, the Alembic files are supported by the MXObjectAlembic extension object.