Alembic ABC Viewer for Windows

Review baked Alembic geometry

Tridi Viewer opens supported .abc files locally on Windows. Inspect cached polygon geometry, hierarchy, FaceSet material assignments, source topology, and time-sampled playback without loading the scene into a full digital-content-creation application.

Alembic is designed for efficiently storing sampled scene data rather than editable rigs, constraints, or procedural history. It is commonly used to hand off baked animation and simulation results between applications, so visual inspection is most useful for confirming what was actually written to the cache.

Common Alembic viewing use cases

• Review a baked character, cloth, or deformation cache before downstream lighting and rendering.
• Check hierarchy, transforms, normals, UVs, and FaceSet assignments after an export.
• Scrub a time-sampled mesh to find missing frames, unexpected deformation, or changing topology.
• Inspect the currently displayed sample before exporting supported content to another model format.

Supported Alembic data

• Ogawa PolyMesh hierarchy, transforms, normals, UVs, and source topology.
• Common surface materials, local textures, and FaceSet assignments.
• Constant- and changing-topology time samples with nearest-sample playback.
• Current displayed-sample inspection and supported model export.

Playback and topology considerations

Tridi Viewer selects the nearest authored sample during playback; it does not invent interpolation between cached mesh samples. A constant-topology cache reuses the same connectivity over time, while a changing-topology cache may require more preparation and memory because each sample can carry different polygon data.

Solid Wireframe and object selection apply to the currently displayed sample. Exporting a time-sampled scene captures that sample as static geometry, so it is not a substitute for transferring the complete Alembic animation to another pipeline.

Alembic support boundaries

HDF5 archives, subdivision surfaces, curves, and points are not implemented. Renderer-specific shader networks may not map to the viewer, and very large topology-changing samples can take longer to prepare. Cameras, lights, procedural controls, and application-specific data should be checked in the originating tool.

Format reference: the official Alembic project describes archives, object hierarchy, geometry schemas, and time samples.

Related viewer guides