2.6

Merged the particles-2010 branch with node improvements into trunk.

I've started a few days ago, a new Blender branch, to add Alembic support.

I think Alembic is a very important file format for the future. It's already

supported in Maya,

Nuke, Houdini, Softimage, Renderman, ... It's small, very efficient for

baking any type of

animation and fast to read. It's really great.

I already have a basic exporter, similar to the Collada one, written in C++.

It exports

object hierarchies, meshes with animated modifiers, normals, uvs and

also cameras.

I posted some screenshots here: http://ramencomp.blogspot.com

For the import part, I was thinking about using python drivers for object

transforms

and a new modifier for the geometry animation. I added a bpy.alembic module

and ported the code from Alembic's Houdini plugin. I can use the functions

in bpy.alembic

in drivers, to get the data from the archive. I haven't started the modifier

yet.

Everything is optional, using a CMake option (WITH_ALEMBIC). Alembic depends

on Boost,

OpenEXR's Imath ( both already being used in blender) and also HDF5 (new)

There are other possible uses of Alembic inside Blender, like replacing the

fluid and particle

caches with Alembic files, that could also be interesting.