Multiverse Studio 4 Adds Alembic, USD and MaterialX Support

J Cube Inc. is the R&D Company of Polygon Pictures, who recently have released a new version of Multiverse Studio 4, including a free trail version for the firs time. Multiverse is an IO Management tool that lets you read and write huge amounts of data with an on-demand type of workflow.

Multiverse is ultra fast and memory efficient compared to the Maya native tools. Multiverse Studio 4 introduces a new unified asset read and write architecture with the Hyperspace API. The API natively wraps Alembic and USD (and future ones) and covers all geometric data. The Hyperspace API is distributed as a single header file along with its library, on all platforms.

What’s New in Multiverse Studio 4

  • New and completely unified UI: now you can read/write Assets regardless of the data format or backend, this is why they are just called “Assets”.
  • Sample interpolation in Maya VP2 and during procedural rendering both in Maya and KATANA. This means you get free (linear) 3D motion blur even with just 1 sample per frame (space saving of 50% in case of deformation motion blur)

  • Timing & re-timing controls for Assets (very useful for crowds)

  • Complete primitives and property support. this includes poly, sub-d, points, curves, normals, tangents, creases, visibility etc…
  • Material exchange of full shading networks, including displacement via MaterialX (See the MaterialXS open source project https://github.com/j-cube/materialxs). Works from Maya to Katana using 3Delight for Katana

  • High performance Asset Read with “Elastic Compounds”, can be unpacked, packed, and drawn in the VP2 fast and with super efficient memory use
  • https://vimeo.com/214434209
  • Improved bounding box reading mode now can read any asset, regardless of its inherent hierarchical complexity
  • Now includes a full distribution of USD, including Python bindings, on all platforms and on all Maya versions
  • Multi-task writing: (scripted) ability to write multiple Assets in one go with one Maya DAG evaluation: http://multi-verse.io/plugins/maya/tools/#assetwrite
  • Support of several HOUDINI features: velocity motion blur, packed instances etc.: https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Houdini-User-Reference-Guidelines-ZBBZcRQvRUwXtoPcKYIPf
  • Largely improved 3Delight procedural
  • Improved PRMan procedural (subdivs, creases, UVs, motion blur…)
  • Arnold 5 support is WIP, working also on adding VRay soon™ 😉
  • New “Elastic Compositions”: ability to write and read USD
  • compositions in Maya (we call them elastic because once read you can unpack Assets
  • New high-level documentation (http://multi-verse.io/plugins/maya/tools), regular documentation, release notes & website.