Prepare your Alembic files for Unity in Autodesk® DCC applications

Many Digital Content Creation (DCC) applications allow you to export models as Alembic (­­­­.abc­­­­) files. Depending on your asset roundtrip scenario, you might need to export your Alembic files from your DCC application with additional data so that Unity can access and properly interpret this data at import.

The table below gives high-level instructions according to the type of data you would need to export from either Autodesk® Maya® or Autodesk® 3ds Max® and use in Unity.

Data to export	Autodesk® Maya®	Autodesk® 3ds Max®	Typical use case
Face Sets	On export, enable Write Face Sets	In the Export Data section, enable Material IDs	When Unity imports an Alembic mesh that contains face sets, it creates a sub-mesh for every face set. This allows you to apply a unique material for every face set/sub-mesh instead of one material for the whole object. Note: You need face sets to use the Alembic Material Remapper.
Color Sets	On export, enable Write Color Sets	In the Export Data section, enable Vertex Colors	Vertex Colors allow you to define a specific color for each vertex of a mesh. During rendering, Unity uses this color as the surface color of the object.
UV Sets	On export, enable Write UV Sets	In the Export Data section, enable UVs	UVs are used to map textures onto polygon meshes. They define what portion of a texture should be applied to which polygon of a mesh.

Note

There is currently no way to export an Alembic file that includes materials.