Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by joeld42 3559 days ago
Neither, and both. Lets say you have a scene with a cup of coffee spilling onto a desk...

The overall description of the scene, where the desk is, the lights and materials etc, could be stored in a USD scene.

Some tool would read this and generate an intermediate file in RIB format. This would be what a RenderMan renderer actually reads.

For the fluid sim itself, the generated RIB file might contain a reference to a plugin which points to the baked Alembic data, which would be a directory with one alembic file per-frame of mesh data representing the fluid surface.