Alembic support

The Alembic file format allows for very efficient storage of geometry and other scene data, which can now be referenced directly in Maxwell 3. Support for Alembic includes static and animated geometry as well as particles, improving the speed and efficiency of your workflow. 

The Alembic scene format is an industry standard format developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks 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.

Some 3D applications have native support for Alembic format and allow you to import and export alembic files containing different elements, such as geometry, particles or cameras. 

There are 3rd party plugins such as Exocortex Crate that provide extended functions for some 3D platforms such as 3DS Max, Maya or Softimage.  

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 through the MXObjectAlembic extension object: 

Parameters

• Scene scale: General scale factor for the whole imported scene
• Alembic file: Path to the Alembic file. 
• Frame number: In case of Alembic files that contain timeline animation information, this value indicates the number of the frame on the Alembic sequence to be loaded. 
• FPS: Frames per second for the imported animation. 
• Shutter Speed: Interval (in 1/sec) to calculate the transformation motion blur of each frame in the sequence. 
• Xform Substeps: Number of substeps considered for the transformation motion blur on each shutter speed interval (centered in the frame in course). 
• File Axis System: Indicate the axis that will serve as the scene's height axis, derived from the axis system with which the Alembic file were created. 

Smoothing 

• Force Recalculate Normals: Enable this option when you want your mesh to look smooth regarding certain angle. 
• Angle Threshold: Define the angle below which the normals are interpolated, resulting on an smooth look.