On Tuesday morning, Sony Pictures Imageworks and Industrial Light & Magic jointly announced Alembic, a new open-source geometry format that the companies hope will become a de facto standard for easy interchange among applications and between VFX facilities. “We’re hoping Alembic will do for geometry what OpenEXR did for images,” said SPI CTO Rob Bredow.

“We’re into the idea of developing communities around our software,” Bredow said, explaining the decision on the part of the two companies to merge their work on a new, lightweight standard for sharing the geometry of 3D scenes. “It’s also key to show people that we are open to collaboration. And it’s really helpful for us to have good standards.”

“This is not a competitive advantage,” said Lucasfilm CTO Richard Kerris. “The thing that makes this work for everybody is that it’s a useful tool for everyone.” The project has been under development at SPI for more than a year; the two companies have been working together for about six months.

The companies demo’d the software using a heavy rig for the Transformer Bumblebee as an example. Even if it were possible to easily share such a complicated and proprietary rig among companies, ILM wouldn’t want to. Alembic features a lightweight OpenGL-based viewer application that allows a user to quickly and easily look at and evaluate the asset without opening it in a 3D application. (It’s like using a stripped-down image viewer instead of firing up Photoshop.)

The companies also showed a simple Maya scene being loaded into an NVIDIA fluid solver to quickly model the behavior of fluids in that 3D space. Unlike the somewhat similar FBX format, Autodesk’s solution for interoperability among its own applications, Alembic includes only information about geometry, which makes file sizes much smaller. It is optimized for performance. But because it’s open source, it will be possible for power users to add more information to the database if necessary.

The companies announced support from Autodesk Nvidia, Pixar (Renderman), The Foundry, Luxology, and Side Effects Software. Alembic will be available beginning next month on Google Code. More information is available at http://alembic.io