In high end visual effects should should be quite useful. Just to be clear, it isn't intended for games or real-time 3D graphics. It is designed for huge complex scenes where one wants to have delayed loading and renderer integrations.
I have been hearing about this for some time.
It isn't clear how quickly this will be embraced by 3D content creation vendors as it can significantly increase interoperability and reduce lock-in.
Here is the overview of the format and motiviation:
I wouldn't call it an "addition" exactly.... It could be used in conjunction with it, as the overview points out, with the Abc files being used as the leaf nodes for the actual geometry representation.
But the SceneGraph representation (USD) will need to be the starting point, as Alembic doesn't (yet) provide a nice way of doing overrides or referencing other external files which is what this spec provides.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alembic_(Computer_Graphics)
In high end visual effects should should be quite useful. Just to be clear, it isn't intended for games or real-time 3D graphics. It is designed for huge complex scenes where one wants to have delayed loading and renderer integrations.
I have been hearing about this for some time.
It isn't clear how quickly this will be embraced by 3D content creation vendors as it can significantly increase interoperability and reduce lock-in.
Here is the overview of the format and motiviation:
http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/overview.html