Maya - Alembic - USDZ

Question

JeremyRaven OP

Created Feb ’19

Replies 3

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Cant seem to get animated alembic file out of Maya and animate in a finder window let alone as a usdz file.

It seems easy enough to create an alembic cache in Maya and then import it back in without any problems there.

But when I select the alembic cache in a finder window or preview, all I get is a single frame without animation.

Do animations by default not auto play in a finder window? Does anyone know of a good previewer that will play Alembic animations easily on OSX?

This is the first step for me to try to get the alembic to USDZ because even after using the xcrun command on the .abc file I still dont get any animations to show up in a usdz previewer. So there seems to be something wrong with the .abc file even though Maya has no issue with importing one and playing animations.

Regards

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Answer 1

Miro OP

Feb ’19

In my experince so far, the alembic support in converting to USDZ only supports animation using point translation & not caches. Admittely, I am not an expert on the alembic file format.

I had spend time also looking into using Unity 3D & Unreal for alembic support in the context of an AR proof of concept. Unity does not support alembic caches on mobile while Unreal does.

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Answer 2

JeremyRaven OP

Feb ’19

According to gchiste from Apple support it does work see the following quote.

But it doesnt work for me. My Alembic cache is made up of point translations using MASH Maya's motion graphic toolset.

gchisteNov 6, 2018 8:48 PM(

in response to JeremyRaven)

This is how you import an Alembic file (with or without animations) into SceneKit:

1. First make sure that you import SceneKit.ModelIO

2. Drag your .abc file into your project (make sure you check the box for the file's Target Membership)

At this point, you should be able to see your model (with its animations) in Xcode, if you can't there is an issue with your model (or animations)

3. Initialize an MDLAsset using the URL of your file: let asset = MDLAsset(url: Bundle.main.url(forResource: "name of your file", withExtension: "abc")!

4. Initialize an SCNScene from your MDLAsset: SCNScene(mdlAsset: asset)

This method is fairly robust, I won't claim that it will work 100% of the time, but I just tested it with 10 random .blend files (with animations) that I found on the internet. Then I exported the models as .abc from Blender. They all worked in SceneKit.

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Answer 3

JeremyRaven OP

Dec ’20

I still havent found a solution to this, just wondering if there has been any updates Ive missed.

Just tried this: Create animated fluids cloud, convert to polygon mesh, export mesh to Alembic, new scene, import Alembic - it works! Preview .abc file on OSX, no animation, usdzconvert .abc to .usdz file, no animation, import into Reality Composer, no animation.

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