Feature Request [Mesh] Extend the supported platforms of alembic

Hi, we are aware currently that Alembic package wasn't aiming mobile platform, thus why it is not simple to build it on those platofrms. In addiction alembic is very slow and may really not be a good fit for those platforms. That said, it is still a topic under consideration, but we don't have any short term plan.

 

Indeed, Alembic is mostly used as an interop format for hair, as it would be too expensive for the runtime.

Alembic contains a lot of third party C++ native libs not compatible by default with mobile, and porting+maintaining on every platform needs work.

Moreover, in our experience (internal and external studios), even on PC, Alembic's cost is prohibitive and very often ends up being replaced with a more dedicated system when it comes to production. The top requirement is for interop and offline cinematics, and this is why we added to Mich-L to showcase that usage (mostly for learning purpose), while keeping it small because we wanted to Mich-L to still run in real-time but we would have not used this for an interactive content on mobile.

Note that if you have a specific usage in mind with specific target hardware, you could try building Alembic for your target platform since you have access to the package. We did some tests internally, and for iOS it was quite fast to get a first version up and running.