Alembic USD Plugin

Configure Environment

The Alembic USD plugin is not built by default. To enable it, the PXR_BUILD_ALEMBIC_PLUGIN option must be specified when running CMake. Check the 3rd Party Library and Application Versions document for the Alembic library versions that have been used for testing.

For more information see our page on Advanced Build Configuration.

As shipped, USD supports its own text (usda) and binary (usdc) file formats. However, it is possible for USD to support additional formats by providing it with a custom file format plugin. One of these plugins, usdAbc, which provides the ability to interact with Alembic files, is included in the pxr/usd/plugin directory of the USD distribution. In this example, we’ll demonstrate the extended USD functionality using the existing USD tools.

Let’s start by creating a simple USD file (save it as hello.usda):

#usda 1.0

def Xform "hello"
{
    def Sphere "world"
    {
    }
}

The previous snippet defined a simple sphere in the .usda file format. Now, let’s use usdcat to convert it to an Alembic file!

$ usdcat hello.usda --out hello.abc

Now we can use usdview to view our new alembic file.

$ usdview hello.abc
http://openusd.org/images/plugins_alembic_usdview.jpg

We can also convert this Alembic file back to USD using a similar call to usdcat.

$ usdcat hello.abc --out hello_converted.usda

Known Limitations

In general, Alembic files can be used in place of USD files. There are some caveats to our current Alembic support in usdAbc. For example, we translate AbcGeom Schemas except for FaceSet, NuPatch and Light.

Also, we currently don’t translate Alembic’s notion of Component Ops, instead we currently flatten them into a 4x4 Matrix, this could be added in the future.

Finally, while we hope to achieve lossless translation from abc to usd, Alembic files will never perform as well as native USD binary files in composed scenes