Hi Michael,

We are using .abc (alembic) since a little while to export/import stuffs in our 'polygon' pipeline.
http://www.alembic.io/

I'm pretty sure this stuff support instances description.
Even if the main purpose of this format is to export animation data (stream file), it seems much more 'solid' than anything I have used so far (.fbx, .dae).

There is no real need to have an .abc export in MoI, but maybe it might be an alternative to .fbx in the future to handle instances.

Hi Pascal, yeah once instancing is in place inside of MoI it will probably make sense to do some new file format support after that to use some formats that handle instancing... alembic could make sense at that time. I'm not really familiar with it myself at all so I don't know what's really involved. I guess Collada is the other one that's meant to be similar is that right?

How is it that alembic is more robust for you than Collada, is it newer and supports more kinds of animation stuff?

- Michael

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 ;)