SIGGRAPH: ILM & IMAGEWORKS PARTNER ON INTERCHANGE FORMAT
ILM and Imageworks joined forces earlier this year when it became apparent that they were independently developing software designed to solve the same problem: making it easily to share complex animated scenes across a variety of disciplines and facilities regardless of the software used. Alembic includes tools that allow collaboration while working with a generic, extensible, data representation scheme.
Alembic is being offered via the BSD 2.0 license and is written in C++ and Python, leveraging the boost and HDF5 C/C++ libraries heavily, as well as OpenEXR.
“Even though we recently started using our new format on multiple productions, as soon as we learned about ILM’s concurrent development it was immediately clear that one open source format utilizing the very best technology from both companies would offer the best solution for the industry,” notes Rob Bredow, CTO of Sony Pictures Imageworks. “It helps all of us to have good standards."
Lucasfilm CTO Richard Kerris adds: "By combining production knowledge we get something better for our industry. This is a useful tool for everyone."