Friday, December 12th, 2014 Posted by Jim Thacker

Exocortex open sources Exocortex Crate

Exocortex has made Crate, its suite of Alembic tools for 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, Arnold and Python, available open source under a GPL3 licence. It will continue to provide support for commercial customers.

The plugins, which provide “seamless import and export of Alembic data” between host applications in mixed production pipelines, have been used on movies including Pacific Rim and Iron Man 3.

Superseded by native Alembic support
Released commercially in 2012, the plugins made the industry-standard data interchange format available to 3ds Max and Softimage users for the first time.

Since then, Autodesk has added native Alembic support in 3ds Max 2015 Extension 1 and Softimage 2015, but the Crate source code gives users a chance to customise that import/export functionality.

Availability and version support
The source code is available on GitHub, or you can download compiled versions of the tools from Exocortex’s website if you enter your email address.

The open source version of Crate includes binaries for Maya 2010 and above (Windows/Linux), 3ds Max 2010 and above, Softimage 2012 and above (Windows/Linux) and Arnold 3.x and above (Windows/Linux).

The Python 2.6 version runs on Windows and Linux; the Python 2.7 version on Windows only.

Read the announcement on Exocortex’s blog

Download compiled versions of Crate from the product page