Tuesday, October 30th, 2012 Posted by Jim Thacker

Digital Frontier ships free 3ds Max Alembic importer

Digital Frontier has released a free plugin for importing files in the Alembic format into 3ds Max.

The plugin, called simply ‘Alembic’, was developed for use on the movie Resident Evil: Damnation: one of the characters from which guest stars in the video above.

Judging by the demo, it does pretty much what you’d hope: imports models exported in Alembic format (in this case, from Maya) complete with character animation, including support for modifiers and hair.

Free for users of 3ds Max 2010 and above
Unlike the only other fully featured Alembic importer we’re aware of for Max (Exocortex’s Crate plugin suite, which is really designed to run across mixed pipelines), Alembic completely free.

Alembic is compatible with 3ds Max 2010 and above, although you’ll need the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 library if you’re using 3ds Max 2010 itself.

Read more about Alembic on the Digital Frontier website (includes download link)