Age | Commit message (Collapse) | Author |
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Write custom properties (aka ID properties) to Alembic, to the
`.userProperties` compound property.
Manifest Task: https://developer.blender.org/T50725
Scalar properties (so single-value/non-array properties) are written as
single-element array properties to Alembic. This is also what's done by
Houdini and Maya exporters, so it seems to be the standard way of doing
things. It also simplifies the implementation.
Two-dimensional arrays are flattened by concatenating all the numbers
into a single array. This is because ID properties have a limited type
system. This means that a 3x3 "matrix" could just as well be a list of
three 3D vectors.
Alembic has two container properties to store custom data:
- `.userProperties`, which is meant for properties that aren't
necessarily understood by other software packages, and
- `.arbGeomParams`, which can contain the same kind of data as
`.userProperties`, but can also specify that these vary per face of a
mesh. This property is mostly intended for renderers.
Most industry packages write their custom data to `.arbGeomParams`.
However, given their goals I feel that `.userProperties` is the more
appropriate one for Blender's ID Properties.
The code is a bit more involved than I would have liked. An
`ABCAbstractWriter` has a `uniqueptr` to its `CustomPropertiesExporter`,
but the `CustomPropertiesExporter` also has a pointer back to its owning
`ABCAbstractWriter`. It's the latter pointer that I'm not too happy
with, but it has a reason. Getting the aforementioned `.userProperties`
from the Alembic library will automatically create it if it doesn't
exist already. If it's not used to actually add custom properties to, it
will crash the Alembic CLI tools (and maybe others too). This is what
the pointer back to the `ABCAbstractWriter` is used for: to get the
`.userProperties` at the last moment, when it's 100% sure at least one
custom property will be written.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D8869
Reviewed by: sergey, dbystedt
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Add support for object data instancing. This is used when the objects
are instances, for example when duplicated by a particle system, or
instanced by the duplication system (collection-duplicating empties,
vertex/face duplis, etc.)
Since Alembic already deduplicates data, this doesn't make the resulting
Alembic files any smaller. They will be faster to write, though, when
there is a lot of instanced geometry, as the deduplication system won't
have to do any comparisons.
This instancing support is still limited, in the sense that only object
data is instanced and all transforms are still written explicitly. A
future improvement could be to support instancing entire collection
hierarchies.
Blender's Alembic importer has no understanding of these Alembic
instances yet, and will thus happily duplicate the data on import.
The USD Alembic plugin seems to have problems understanding the
instancing. There might also be other software with similar issues.
Because of this, instancing can be turned off in the exporter (it's on
by default).
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No functional changes
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This patch adds the ability to render motion blur from Alembic caches.
The motion blur data is derived from a velocity attribute whose name has
to be defined by the user through the MeshSequenceCache modifier, with a
default value of ".velocities", which is the standard name in Alembic
for the velocity property, although other software may ignore it and
write velocity with their own naming convention (e.g. "v" in Houdini).
Furthermore, a property was added to define how the velocity vectors
are interpreted with regard to time : frame or second. "Frame"
means that the velocity is already scaled by the time step and we do not
need to modify it for it to look proper. "Second" means that the unit
the velocity was measured in is in seconds and so has to be scaled by
some time step computed here as being the time between two frames (1 /
FPS, which would be typical for a simulation). This appears to be
common, and is the default behavior.
Another property was added to control the scale of the velocity to
further modify the look of the motion blur.
Reviewed By: brecht, sybren
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2388
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No functional changes.
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Alembic is not a single file format, it can be stored in two different
ways: Ogawa and HDF5. Ogawa replaced HDF5 and is smaller and much faster
(4-25x) to read ([source](http://exocortex.com/blog/alembic_is_about_to_get_really_fast)).
As long as Blender has had Alembic support, it has never supported the
HDF5 format in any release. There is a build option `WITH_ALEMBIC_HDF5`
that can be used to enable HDF5 support in your own build. This commit
removes this build option and the code that it manages.
In the years that I have been maintainer of Blender's Alembic code, I
only remember getting a request to support HDF5 once, and that was to
support very old software that has likely since then been updated to
support Ogawa. Ubuntu and Fedora also seem to bundle Blender without
HDF5 support.
This decision was discussed on
[DevTalk](https://devtalk.blender.org/t/alembic-hdf5-support-completely-remove)
where someone also mentioned that there is a tool available that can
convert HDF5 files to the Ogawa format.
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In rB7c5a44c71f13 I changed the way transform matrices are loaded from
Alembic. Instead of having the Alembic importer convert matrices from
local (in the Alembic file) to World (to pass to the constraint handling
the animation of transforms), I set the constraint space to
`CONSTRAINT_SPACE_LOCAL`.
This worked thanks to rB7728bfd4c45c. However, that commit was reverted,
which meant that for parentless objects `CONSTRAINT_SPACE_LOCAL` no
longer means "local space".
The situation is resolved by setting the constraint to world space
again, and computing the world matrix in the Alembic importer.
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This moves the `alembic`, `avi`, `collada`, and `usd` modules into a common
`io` directory.
This also cleans up some `#include "../../{somedir}/{somefile}.h"` by
adding `../../io/{somedir}` to `CMakeLists.txt` and then just using
`#include "{somefile}.h"`.
No functional changes.
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