Frame from alembic

[MENOZ]

Hello, anyone knows if it's possible to use getattribute() to read a specific frame from a alembic file?

If I have a sequence of files I can do "my/Path.$F4.bgeo" and setting the $F in vex with what I need. But if it's a single alembic file how can I do?

[anim]

you can just timeshift your input to the frame you want and sample that in your VEX

 

however I don't think there is a way in VEX to directly sample geometry at different than current frame at the moment

[MENOZ]

thank you.

I want to sample  an attribute at a different time for each point, so caching to disk allows me to pick the frames i need easily. my geo is quite big so I was thinking to use alembic because it maybe gives me a faster access to different frames.

[anim]

I figured that may be what you are after, so that was the second part of the answer, I don't know of a VEX way currently

 

you could do it through CHOPs, but for that it would still have to load all frames you are interested in into memory, once loaded and cached you can process the data, retime, etc, lock chops and then use the data in your VEX

Edited July 30, 2015 by anim

[MENOZ]

thank you anim, 

i tought about chops, but i excluded it because it would be too memory expensive. If I have 2 mil points mesh it would be difficult to handle in chops, at least for me.

 

do you have an example / tips on to how to do handle this in chops on high poly mesh and be quicker (in cooking time) than reading bgeo sequence?

[anim]

it wouldn't be quicker to load, however it would allow you to cache the data into channels and then possibly work with those , which would be faster as the lookups would be happening in memory not on disk, you would still need to fit all data in the memory or at least desired subset of data you want to do operations on

Edited July 30, 2015 by anim