 |
|||||||||||
|
 |
||||||||||
  |
|||||||||
| LUCASFILM AND SONY PICTURES IMAGEWORKS RELEASE ALEMBIC 1.0 | |||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Open source exchange format provides standard for exchanging animated computer graphics scenes between content creation software packages. VANCOUVER, B.C. - August 9, 2011 - Alembic 1.0, the open source project jointly developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks and Lucasfilm Ltd. was released to the public today, it was announced at ACM SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Alembic is the computer graphics interchange format developed by the two entertainment giants last year and focused on efficiently storing and sharing animation and visual effects scenes across multiple software applications. It was designed to handle massive animation data sets often required in high-end visual effects and animation, which are routinely developed and produced by companies such as Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic and Lucasfilm Animation Ltd. and Sony Pictures Imageworks. The studios each saw the need for a tool like Alembic, something that would fit within existing pipelines and allow for customization at the facility level without impeding the ability to share work. In addition to the features announced at last year's SIGGRAPH, Alembic 1.0 includes automatic data de-duplication. The software automatically recognizes repeated shapes in complicated geometry and only writes a single instance to disk. This makes Alembic 1.0 use dramatically less disk space than promised without requiring any extra steps on the part of the user and can improve both write and read performance as well. In the case of hero deforming humanoid characters, including hair, shot caches have been reduced by more than 70%. For complex, deeply hierarchical and mostly rigid assets like the Transformers characters, tests have shown cache reduction in the order of 98%. The code base for Alembic is available for download on the project's Google Code site and more information can be found online at: http://www.alembic.io Joint development of Alembic was first announced at last year's Siggraph by Lucasfilm's visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks. The companies joined forces when it became apparent that they were independently developing software designed to solve, a problem universally faced by the visual effects and animation production community: how to easily share complex animated scenes across a variety of disciplines and facilities regardless of what software was being used. Alembic includes tools that allow collaboration while working with a generic, extensible, data representation scheme. In essence, it distills complex and often proprietary, animated scenes into application-independent files with baked geometric results. These baked results can be fully re-importable across the range of supporting software. "Alembic addresses a fundamental issue in a world where assets are shared across many companies. Alembic's production-ready ability to seamlessly translate shapes across a wide variety of applications saves time and resources," said Rob Bredow, CTO of Sony Pictures Imageworks. "By releasing Alembic as an Open Source project, users have the opportunity to improve the software based on their needs and experience. We're really starting to feel the positive effects of Open Source, as a community of visual effects and animation professionals come together to solve problems more effectively today than ever before." "Alembic is giving us space efficiencies beyond our most optimistic expectations and at effectively the same time cost as before. This is sure to have a significant impact for anyone who uses the format and we are excited to be able to share this with the Open Source community," said Tommy Burnette, Head of Global Pipeline at Lucasfilm Ltd. "Previously each facility had to produce their own unique solutions to the problem of efficient caching and scene handoff, but the beauty of Open Source is that with strong collaborative efforts we can effectively provide solutions for everyone." Both studios have made strides with open source software and recognize the importance of such initiatives, ILM with the industry standard OpenEXR format and Imageworks with OSL, Open Color I/O, Maya Reticle, Field3D, Scala Migrations and the newly release PyP. Here's what some of the leading solution providers have to say about Alembic:
"The visual effects industry continually strives to reduce production complexity and improve collaboration throughout the pipeline. Autodesk is excited to support the implementation of production-tested technology, like Alembic, which enables digital entertainment artists to spend less time on internal custom software development and more time on creative storytelling. And that's a win-win, not just for the industry, but for the audience.",
"The way that ILM and Sony Pictures Imageworks have collaborated on this initiative has been truly impressive. Alembic is clearly born from real production experience of the demands of scalable asset driven production, which is vital to give it the robust foundation to become a major new industry standard. At The Foundry we wholeheartedly support Alembic."
"Multi-application pipelines offer maximum flexibility for modern digital content production, and the Alembic format offers a reliable and open path to exchange data between modo and other leading 3D applications. Luxology is excited to demonstrate today what we have been able to achieve with the initial implementation of Alembic in modo."
"With Alembic, ILM and Sony Imageworks have created an invaluable interoperability tool that fits perfectly into Houdini's procedural philosophy. Our tests have shown how efficient Alembic can be and we know our customers will be thrilled." Alembic is being offered via the New BSD License and is written in C++ and Python, leveraging the boost and HDF5 C/C++ libraries heavily, as well as OpenEXR. For more information visit: opensource.imageworks.com or www.alembic.io
|
|||||||||
| ALEMBIC AT SIGGRAPH 2011 | |||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Alembic 1.0 Press Event
TUESDAY, 9 AUGUST 9:30 AM - 10:30 AM
Join Lucasfilm and Sony Pictures Imageworks as they give a joint update on the current state of the open source initiative, Alembic, and the software's upcoming 1.0 release. Vendors such as Autodesk, The Foundry, Luxology, and Side Effects Software will be on hand to demonstrate Alembic working in their software and answer questions.
Tommy Burnette - Lucasfilm Singapore Please note that priority seating will be provided to members of the press.
Practical integration of Alembic WEDNESDAY, 10 AUGUST 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM A dialogue with the Alembic development team focused on pipeline integration and optimization of the format. Topics include API usage, collaboration with studio partners, and standardization of the format.
|
|||||||||
| UPDATES | |||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
July 12, 2011 - Alembic 1.0rc1 Beta Update Hello Alembic users! Welcome to the latest beta version of Alembic. As we close in on a 1.0 release, we hope the API and file format are now stable and fully forwards-compatible. We consider these to be at a first "Release Candidate" stage. (note that this doesn't yet apply to the application- specific reference implementations). As with all pre-release software, we can't guarantee that changes won't occur between now and a full 1.0 release. The main Mercurial repository has been updated (http://code.google.com/) p/alembic/source/list), and a new tarball has been uploaded (http://code.google.com/p/alembic/downloads/list). This release is mostly a bugfix and cleanup release. We've improved the build support for Windows and OS X, as well as conformed the definitions of the Curves and NuPatch types more closely to the RI spec. Those changes, though, do mean that Curves and NuPatch geometry written out with previous releases will not be recognized with this release. The complete code changes for this release can be examined here: http://codereview.appspot.com/4662068 Some highlights:
One other important thing to note: previous releases of Alembic did not require any of the compiled Boost libraries, but going forward, Alembic requires libboost_thread. Although this is our initial 1.0 release candidate, it should still be considered pre-release software, and should not be used for critical, deadline-driven production work. If you have any questions about this release, please feel free to ask them on the alembic-discuss group: http://groups.google.com/group/alembic-discussion Thank you for your continued support! The Alembic Team
May 18, 2011 - Alembic 0.9.3 Beta Update We're pleased to announce the 0.9.3 Beta release of Alembic. Highlights of this version include:
For getting Alembic, see the instructions here: http://code.google.com/p/alembic/wiki/GettingAlembic Thank you for your continued support! The Alembic Team
February 23, 2011 - Alembic 0.9.2 Beta Update We're pleased to announce the 0.9.2 Beta release of Alembic. Highlights of this version include:
We continue to make great progress inside our two studios, but still need additional real-world testing outside of our doors. We ask that you please download and evaluate at your earliest convenience so there is an opportunity to contribute feedback to the 1.0 design. Thank you for your continued support! The Alembic Team
November 2, 2010 - Welcome to the release of Alembic .9 The collaborative effort between Lucasfilm and Sony has been going well and we're pleased to bring this beta release to you. There are some important things to note about this .9 release:
We are pleased with the progress we've made so far, but really look forward to some real-world testing outside of our two studios. Thanks to everyone who has been contributing so far, not only at Lucasfilm and Sony, but to our partners and friends who have been encouraging us on this project. A special note of thanks goes to Chris Horvath, who has recently moved to Sydney to work at Fuel. His daily contributions and passion will be missed. Richard Kerris, CTO Lucasfilm & Rob Bredow, CTO Sony Pictures Imageworks HOME |
| Alembic is an open computer graphics interchange framework. Alembic distills complex, animated scenes into a non-procedural, application-independent set of baked geometric results. This ‘distillation' of scenes into baked geometry is exactly analogous to the distillation of lighting and rendering scenes into rendered image data. Alembic is focused on efficiently storing the computed results of complex procedural geometric constructions. It is very specifically NOT concerned with storing the complex dependency graph of procedural tools used to create the computed results. For example, Alembic will efficiently store the animated vertex positions and animated transforms that result from an arbitrarily complex animation and simulation process which could involve enveloping, corrective shapes, volume-preserving simulations, cloth and flesh simulations, and so on. Alembic will not attempt to store a representation of the network of computations (rigs, basically) which are required to produce the final, animated vertex positions and animated transforms. SUBSCRIBE TO ALEMBIC ANNOUNCE AT GOOGLE GROUPS |
|
TM & © Lucasfilm Entertainment Company Ltd. or Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. © 2010 Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc. All rights reserved.
|
