Alembic has become the new standard for data exchange between different platforms and applications. After proving to be a success in productions like Iron Man 3 (2013) , Pacific Rim (2013) and The Amazing Spiderman (2012), Alembic is here to stay.

The development pipeline in a diverse production environment has never been simpler. Artists work in their preferred DCC tool, and save their scenes in Alembic, for later integration. Exocortex Crate now supports importing and exporting nearly everything you can create in Softimage, 3DS MAx and Maya.

Today we review one feature of Exocortex Crate: the custom ICE attribute export and import functionality for Softimage.

I have some really good news for Alembic users.

In the two years since we first released Alembic suite of tools, we have learnt a lot about how Alembic performs in the real world. One thing that has come up with some of our larger clients, was that the performance of Alembic leaves a bit to be desired when dealing with very deep scene hierarchies and/or thousands of scene nodes.

But a new development is coming very soon that will fix the slow initial load time of Alembic.