constraints.
This avoids traversing the archive everytime object data is needed and
gives an overall consistent ~2x speedup here with files containing
between 136 and 500 Alembic objects. Also this somewhat nicely de-
duplicates code between data creation (upon import) and data streaming
(modifiers and constraints).
The only worying part is what happens when a CacheFile is deleted and/or
has its path changed. For now, we traverse the whole scene and for each
object using the CacheFile we free the pointer and NULL-ify it (see
BKE_cachefile_clean), but at some point this should be re-considered and
make use of the dependency graph.
This would cause Alembic to throw an exception and fail exporting
animations because it was trying to recreate and overwrite the
attributes for each frame.
All in all, this patch adds an Alembic importer, an Alembic exporter,
and a new CacheFile data block which, for now, wraps around an Alembic
archive. This data block is made available through a new modifier ("Mesh
Sequence Cache") as well as a new constraint ("Transform Cache") to
somewhat properly support respectively geometric and transformation data
streaming from alembic caches.
A more in-depth documentation is to be found on the wiki, as well as a
guide to compile alembic: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/
User:Kevindietrich/AlembicBasicIo.
Many thanks to everyone involved in this little project, and huge shout
out to "cgstrive" for the thorough testings with Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini
and Realflow as well as @fjuhec, @jensverwiebe and @jasperge for the
custom builds and compile fixes.
Reviewers: sergey, campbellbarton, mont29
Reviewed By: sergey, campbellbarton, mont29
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2060
