Hello!

Is there a workflow for sourcing particle/smoke simulations using alembic files? Whenever I try to source particles from my animated alembic they just appear at the origin. When I try to source smoke it takes forever during the initial cook to sim just 1 frame, so I cancel it. Any thoughts? Thanks!

You need to ‘unpack’ the alembics first, depending on the node that is creating the source. (some nodes will autoconvert to polygons.) Try the unpack sop, followed by the convert sop to get a deforming polygonal mesh–something most sourcing tools will understand.

Thanks, jsmack, it worked! I ended up importing one version of the alembic with default settings, and deleting the hierarchy until just the camera remained. Then I imported the same file again, but I unchecked Load Full Object Hierarchy. This gave me just the meshes to work with. Inside the alembic node I set Load As to Unpack Alembic Delayed Load Primitives and then converted to polygons as you suggested.