Maya - Alembic - USDZ

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.

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.

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.