Leading visual effects houses Industrial Light & Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks have co-developed an open source system aimed at a common problem in the visual effects industry: How to easily share complex animated scenes across a variety of disciplines and facilities regardless of what software is being used.  Dubbed Alembic, this is essentially a computer graphics interchange format focused on efficiently storing and sharing animation and visual effects scenes across multiple software applications. That includes off the shelf software as well as proprietary or customized toolsets, within a single facility or across multiple VFX houses.

“All VFX companies, like us, work with multiple partners around the world and have multiple products in the same facility,” said Lucasfilm CTO Richard Kerris. ”Now they have a way to be assured that what they send and receive back is consistent.  This can shorten production complexities when dealing with multiple geographic locations and multiple products,” he added, suggesting that directors, cinematographers and others in the filmmaking process will feel the impact.  “It won’t be ‘we have to redo this because we got the wrong files’ or ‘our system can’t read those files’ or ‘our proprietary system doesn’t talk to that third-party system.’ All of that can eventually go away.”

The code base for Alembic is now available for download on the project’s Google Code site and more information can be found online at www.alembic.io.

“We are still getting the code out there and putting the final touches on the 1.0 version,” reported Imageworks CTO Rob Bredow. “When (manufacturers) see that, they will be able to make their plans.”

Various VFX software developers have already expressed their intent to support the Alembic initiative. “Autodesk is thrilled to support this initiative,” said Marc Petit, senior VP, Autodesk Media & Entertainment. “This will help the entire industry implement modern pipelines for the creation of digital entertainment.” Added Bill Collis, CEO of The Foundry, "These days no software vendor or facility can be an island, and Alembic is a wonderful bridging idea that will remove another unnecessary hurdle in the creative process." Execs from Luxology, NVIDIA, Side Effects Software and Pixar Animation Studios (Renderman) also applauded the project.  

Incidentally, both ILM and Imageworks were independently working on software designed to address this industry-wide issue. Roughly six months ago, they became aware of each other’s effort and teamed up.  Both were pursuing something that would fit within existing pipelines and allow for customization at the facility level without impeding the ability to share work.  ILM and Imageworks explained that Alembic includes tools that allow collaboration while working with a generic, extensible, data representation scheme.  In essence, they said it distills animated scenes into application-independent files with baked geometric results. These baked results can be fully re-importable across supporting software.

Both companies have already tested the developing Alembic in actual production environments.  At Imageworks, that included work on the upcoming “The Green Hornet” and “The Smurfs.”  ILM gave it a test drive on the recent release “Iron Man 2.”

“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 system for the industry,” Bredow commented.

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.