Currently, the only posted Maya Plug-In is an Alembic Geometry Export Plug-In. Motivations for packaging Alembic archive export functionality as a Maya Geometry Export Plug-In in favor of the existing Alembic Geometry Cache Export functionality packaged by default with a Maya release are several-fold:
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The latest version of Maya always uses an outdated version of the Alembic SDK. Through Maya 2018, this was Alembic 1.5.3, while Maya 2019 finally updated to the Alembic 1.7.5 SDK. The latest version of Alembic is currently 1.7.10. Moreover, the Maya Plugin build scripts provided with the Alembic SDK are outdated and -- while they can be built with some effort -- are dependent on a Legacy Maya application architecture that does not successfully build as provided.
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To provide a path for utilizing Alembic as a complete standalone renderable asset format:
- To extend the Maya Alembic output functionality to include per-mesh material set groupings as well as allow for arbitrarily defined Face Set groupings
- To extend current Maya Alembic output functionality to make use of the new(ish) AbcMaterial API, populated with hypershade material object attributes
- To extend Alembic with support for skeletal keyframe animation samples represented as joint transform hierarchies with associated vertex skinning and weighting