A procedural node that is capable of reading Alembic files.

Up Axis

In certain cases, it may be useful to change the orientation to match the axis of the original Alembic file (coming from other applications). For example, if the up direction is mapped to +Z instead of +Y.

Alembic Animation Support

On

Enable reading a sequence of files.

Sequence Start

The start frame of the .abc file sequence.

For example, if your sequence on disk goes from name1001.abc to name 1100.abc, you can pick the files from 1050 to 1080 by entering these values as the Sequence Start and the Sequence End respectively.

Sequence End

The end frame of the .abc file sequence.

Animation Start

The timeline's frame at which the .abc sequence starts to be used.

Animation End

The timeline's frame at which the .abc sequence ends to be used.

If there are not enough files in the sequence to cover the Animation Start-End range, the sequence can be repeated, either from its start or in ping-pong mode.

Replay Speed

Sets the playback speed of the procedural's animation.

Loop Animation

When on, if the animation range exceeds the sequence range, the sequence is looped.

Extend Range

If on, the first and last .abc file of the sequence is used before and after the Animation start and end frame respectively. Else, for those frames, nothing gets rendered.

Ping-Pong Replay

When on, if the animation range exceeds the sequence range, the sequence is read forward, then in reverse, then forward again and so on.

Placeholder

Changes the size of the bounding box representation in the viewport.

Select Operator

Gives the ability to connect Procedural/Alembic nodes in the Operator Graph Editor.

_{Choose which Procedural to use}

From the Operator Graph Editor, you can list the objects connected to the operator.

In this case, there are three INodes, two of them being 3ds MAX instances of the same Arnold Alembic object.

Viewport

Procedural/Alembic files can be introspected to retrieve geometry and display it in the viewport.

Display Mode

The available viewport display modes are:

• Bounding Box (Fast): Displays the contents as a bounding box. It does not need the full ass file load, it simply looks for "bounds" being present. If it is not, it keeps the previous behavior.
• Bounding Box (Content List): Displays the contents as a bounding box and in the content list.
• Points: Displays the contents as points.
• Wireframe: Displays the contents as a wireframe.
• Shape: Displays as a shape with full shading.

Bounding Box Threshold (ratio of screen size)

Defines how much to extend the bounding box of the object. The default value is 0.02.

Animation Cache Size (in frames)

Animation frames load on demand and are kept in a cache of the size defined in the UI. If the cache is not used, the data is always trashed (same as the cache size is 1).

Content

Shows the contents of the file. The content tree view selection cannot be used for selection. Double-clicking copies the sub-node name (path) and can be pasted in an operator.