Hi Michael,

Well the point with alembic is that it's 'just' export a point cache of you animation, meaning that exchanging animation in this format overcome a lots of trouble you usually have with Collada or .fbx. But that's something very specific to poly modeling/animation industry.

Now, I don't know the reason, but it's the first we were able to export data between different software (modo, 3dsmax, realflow, clarisse) without having to care about z-up/y-up problem, wrong normals, lost uv's, broken uv's, bad triangulation, to name a few.

Of course it's jut my limited experience so far, maybe it doesn't work that great for other users ;)