The Alembic file format allows for very efficient storage of geometry and other scene data, which can now be referenced directly in Maxwell 3Render v3. Support for Alembic includes static and animated geometry as well as particles, improving the speed and efficiency of your workflow.
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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 exist in the scene. Otherwise it will create the materials list given in the .abc file if they were missing in are missing from the scene.
The Alembic support allows you to:
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- your plugin,
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- use an Alembic file as an external MXReference, reducing dramatically your scene files size. You load an .abc file just as you would load an .MXS file for referencing. See your plugin documentation for details.
- In Studio, there are two ways to work with Alembic files:
- Simply import it using File>Import. In this case the alembic object will be imported into the scene and be treated as a regular object when saving the scene. This means your MXS will grow larger as the geometry is no longer referencing an outside file.
- You can reference the Alembic file using the extension MWObjectAlembic. To create this extension object, right-click in the Object List panel and choose Create Extension Object>MWObjectAlembic.
Referencing an Alembic file in Studio
Parameters
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Please note that some of these parameters are only relevant for import into Maxwell Studio. For details on the import options when working with your plugin, consult that plugins documentation. |
Scene scale
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General scale factor for the
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imported file. Adjust this setting if the Alembic file imports too small or too large compared to your scene in Studio. This can happen because the file was exported from an application with no particular real world scale in mind.
Alembic file
Path to the Alembic file.
Frame number
If the Alembic file contains animated geometry, this value indicates the frame in the Alembic sequence to be loaded.
FPS
Frames per second used in the imported animation. For predictable motion blur, this should be set to the FPS used when the animation was created.
Shutter Speed
Interval (in 1/sec) to calculate the motion blur in the sequence. Lower values will result in heavier motion blur. A setting of 50 with a setting of 24 FPS should result in similar motionblur as in film shot at 24fps with a rotary shutter of 180 degrees.
Xform Substeps
Number of substeps considered for the transformation motion blur. See the Motion Blur page for details on how the substeps influence the look of motionblur.
File Axis System
Indicates the axis that will serve as the scene's up-axis, derived from the axis system with which the Alembic file were created
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. Some applications consider Z as the up-axis, while in others Y is the up-axis.
Smoothing
Force Recalculate Normals
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If the Alembic file does not contain normals information for the geometry, this option will auto calculate normals on import - thus allowing you to have a smooth object instead of a facetted one.
Angle Threshold
Defines the angle below which the normals are interpolated, resulting in a smooth look. If you set this angle too low, you will start seeing the individual polygons in the geometry.
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Find more information about the Alembic format specification in the Alembic Documentation site. |