Working With Alembic and Arnold Operators

Solid Angle Posts Looks at New Alembic, Operators, and MaterialX Support in MtoA 3.

The latest version of Arnold’s Maya plugin now supports Alembic natively. A new procedural node with MtoA is capable of reading Alembic (.abc) files through Maya’s Pipeline Caching workflow.

Also pushed out in the latest release of MtoA are Operators, an advanced way to let users override any component of an Arnold Scene at render time — Such as overriding parameters, like shaders within a procedural entity such as an Alembic file or cache.

The combination of Alembic and Operator nodes within the Arnold render engine allows for some sophisticated workflows and advanced pipelines.

Operators can also create nodes such as the OpenSource MaterialX.  Using Operator nodes, you can easily carry out general scene inspection and modifications.