Alembic, an open source co-project by ILM and Sony announced this July, has just reached 0.9 stage.

Alembic bakes complex animated scenes with FX into simple non-procedural data ready to be freely used in any pipeline.

Developers want to make sure the following is considered by users:

• This is not a 1.0, therefore commercial or date driven work should not depend on this version.
• The team welcomes feedback and encourages you to post to the  Alembic discussion list or email the team directly.
• Developers would like to collect all .9 feedback during November.
• They are targeting a 1.0 release early 2011, but that will depend on the reports they get on this version. Therefore, no dates are committed to at this time.

Obligatory dependencies:

• 64-bit unix-like OS (Linux, Mac OS X)
• CMake (2.8.0)
• Boost (1.42)
• ilmbase (1.0.1)
• HDF5 (1.8.5-patch1)

Optional dependencies:

• Autodesk Maya (2010)
• Pixar PRMan (15.x)
• OpenEXR (1.6.1)

With the .9 release, the team will begin to engage in conversations with studios and a few vendors about the code and incorporating feedback to help them get to a 1.0 release. This version is avaliable for downloading here.

More on this topic:

• ILM and Sony Pictures Imageworks released Alembic 1.0
• Sony Imageworks releases source code of 5 in-house projects
• Alembic support in Blender is a work in progress