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Blender 3.1: Pipeline, Assets & IO

Alembic

  • Animated vertex colors can now be exported to Alembic (4e2478940e).
  • Reading override layers is now supported (0a08ac2528). Override layers allow to override data (attributes, animations, topology, etc.) from Alembic caches as long the hierarchies inside of the original file and the layer(s) match.

User Interface for the Alembic override layers

Video demonstration of updating an animation using layers.

Asset Browser

  • Asset libraries are indexed for faster browsing (dbeab82a89, 36068487d0).
  • Node groups can be added to asset libraries, and support drag & drop into the node editor (37848d1c8e).

Image I/O

  • Enabled support for OpenEXR DWAB compression (b1bd0f8ffd)

Obj I/O

  • A new C++ version of the .obj exporter is provided as a replacement for the Python addon (4e44cfa3d9)

Some speed comparisons:

Scene File Size (MB) Time Old (s) Time New (s) Speed-up
Default cube: 9 subdivisions 365 132 14 9.4x
Default cylinder: 2038 copies 20 12.3 0.9 13x
  • For updates regarding the python add-on, please check the Add-ons page.

USD

Exporter

  • Export USD Preview Surface shaders from simple Principled BSDF node networks and allow exporting textures referenced by materials to a textures directory next to the USD file (c85c52f2ce)

glTF 2.0

Importer

  • Implement a user extension system (a5205b0289)
  • Performance enhancement when images are packed (c2eeb9bb47)
  • Use relative path when possible (4d2d118f9a)
  • Set empty display size, based on distance parent/children (ec45566f05)
  • Fix invalid index mesh name (c8445b67fc)

Exporter