Alembic is a popular data format for geometry cache nowadays, however, there are no simple workflow to build the AbcImport/AbcExport on windows. In this post, I tried to demonstrate a building flow as simple as possible.

Here is the pre-built binaries for Maya 2013 x64.

Prerequisites

• Boost
  1. open vc10 command prompt
  2. cd c:\boost\boost_1_xx_00
  3. bootstrap.bat
  4. b2 toolset=msvc-10.0 address-model=64 link=static threading=multi –with-program_options –with-thread
• HDF5
• Ilmbase
• Zlib
• glut (optional)

Since I usually build maya plugin with /MD, thus all the static third-party libraries I used are built with /MD.

Pre-Configuration

Now, suppose we have following folder structure:

• alembic_source_root (hg clone https://code.google.com/p/alembic/)
  • houdini
  • lib
  • maya
  • …
  • CMakeLists.txt
  • init_cache.cmake

Create init_cache.cmake

In order to make configuration easier, we could create a simple text file name init_cache.cmake as initial cmake cache:

SET(BOOST_ROOT C:/boost/boost_1_53_0 CACHE PATH "Boost Root")
SET(ENV{HDF5_ROOT} D:/coding/packages/HDF5 CACHE PATH "HDF5 Root")
SET(ILMBASE_ROOT D:/coding/packages/ilmbase CACHE PATH "Ilmbase Root")
SET(ZLIB_ROOT D:/coding/packages/zlib CACHE PATH "Zlib Root")
SET(GLUT_ROOT_PATH D:/coding/packages/glut-3.7 CACHE PATH "Glut Root")
SET(MAYA_ROOT C:/adsk/Maya2013 CACHE PATH "Maya Root")

SET(USE_PYALEMBIC OFF CACHE BOOL "Compile Python Binding")
SET(USE_ARNOLD OFF CACHE BOOL "Use Arnold")

Ps. Please replace the path of each 3rd-party library in your local machine.

Modify CMakeLists.txt (optional)

If we want to link static libraries of Ilmbase, we have to do little modification of CMakeLists.txt in line 80:

#ADD_DEFINITIONS ( -DOPENEXR_DLL -DHALF_EXPORTS )
ADD_DEFINITIONS ( -DPLATFORM_BUILD_STATIC )

Create VC Project

1. open vc10 command prompt
2. cd /d alembic_source_root
3. mkdir vc_proj
4. cd vc_proj
5. cmake -G “Visual Studio 10 Win64” -C ..\init_cache.cmake ..

If all goes well, we could simply open the ALEMBIC.sln and compile the libraries as usual.

Python-Binding?

Actually, I have not successfully built the python binding yet. The primary problem I ran into is about the PyIlmbase.