The only downside I might see with Alembic Camera is the inability to customize and extend according to one's need. To suite the various needs of the productions which might change with each show/project having full development control over simple python classes is way more rapidly developed. Also the reader and writer plugins for various DCC apps can be very easily implemented and incorporated in the existing pipeline using python. And then there is the question of cross-platform development which is a breeze using python.
Not that I have anything against the Alembic Camera, of course it is awesome but might involve a lot of headache with having to compile the whole libraries especially on windows just for the cause of a camera IO and this might be a daunting task for TDs/Devs who do not have much experience with compiling C++ code on various platforms. I would recommend (as suggested before in this thread) to have base class as the data container (basically a python dict) and then to derive from that class a class for each DCC, then use this derived class in the reader/writer plugins. In fact as a bonus you could use the same classes for export/import of light data between various DCC. The only optimization to look for is for the same values at different frames and to implement some sort of compression to make the file size smaller. RLE is one compression that can be implemented but there are other awesome easy to implement in python (In fact alembic does this brilliantly and it is one of the strongest USP for it). Finally, if the writer plugins are not going to use fcurve (bezier) plotting then you need to do more work in the plugins for the interpolation (which according to my view is also fairly easily implemented using various universally accepted methods like bezier, hermite for position and scaling and slerp/nlerp for rotations). On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 3:09 PM, Steven Caron <car...@gmail.com> wrote: > not that there isn't room for a lightweight and free plugin for camera IO > with minimal dependencies but alembic's camera support is pretty good. is > that not working for you? > > now that alembic has it's own python API you don't need to use exocortex > plugin's. by using alembic you don't have to re-implement support for maya, > nuke, houdini, etc. yes, i know building from source is a pain, but we > should push them to make binaries available for various platforms. > > steven > > On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 9:09 PM, Gene Crucean <emailgeneonthel...@gmail.com > > wrote: > >> >> What do you guys think? Any interest in this? I know it's a simple thing >> but I'm sure a lot of you also write these tools at studios quite a bit too >> and could possibly be into something like this. >> >> --
