Stop 3ds Max from locking alembic files (cannot overwrite)

[geoffautodesk]

When importing an alembic file into Max, it locks the file, preventing it from being overwritten - this really, really, really needs to be addressed (either by allowing referencing of alembics as Maya does, or some other way)

It prevents the use of alembics in our pipeline, as we are a mixed studio (Max & Maya) and we can't overwrite alembics while they are being used in Max. This means animation updates are incredibly tedious as the Max user has to actually quit Max to allow updates to take place.

As you can imagine, this is a workflow / pipeline nightmare, so we simply don't use them - as much as I want to!

[electrotoast_old]

Thank you for the Idea! This was Implemented in 3ds Max 2019!

Just wanted to follow up. This Idea has not been Implemented. This was my mistake for marking it as such. I read the wrong issue in our backlog and attributed it to this unexpectedly. It has been moved back to Accepted quite a while ago, but unfortunately is taking longer than expected to find an elegant solution. Apologizes for any misunderstanding.

[geoffautodesk]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for implementing this.. except, in our experience, 3ds Max still locks the file when in use, and it can not be overwritten.

It does not seem to be implemented.

Is there some explanation as to what is going on?

[jcdeblok]

Same here.. still locking up.

[Anonymous]

Does anyone know of a work-around for this?

[geoffautodesk]

Yeah, the work arounds are as follows:

- don’t use alembics with max until they fix this.

Or:

- ask your max artist to kindly drop everything they’re doing in the middle of production and quit max just so you can update the alembic.

[panel01]

What is the situation with this request?  Is it changed from accepted(implemented :)) to future consideration?

It wasn't the best idea in the first place to lock the files this way.

It's a pain in the ass working this way. Version numbers are piling up, since no overwrite,  and sometimes you need to exit max to close the open file connections you already forgot about.

Is there a way to force max to close these opened alembic connections?

[Laurent.Chea]

Hello world.

We were facing the same issue in our pipeline :

- Two sessions of 3dsmax

- Session A : a scene recording .abc files

- Session B : a scene loading those .abc files (in AlembicXform controllers, via maxscript Alembic_Import interface)

- In order to be able to update the .abc files content within session A, we first unload in B the AlembicXform data by clearing the fields "object" and "source" : no problem so far, the AlembicXform controllers status are "Unresolved", the character in our scene looks correctly resetted.

- Then comes the failure : even if all AlembicXform controllers seem correctly unloaded in B, trying to record the data again in A throws a "locked file" error.

After a day of investigation, it appeared that only the lastly loaded file in B is locked.

In fact, one .abc file is locked as soon as its path is provided to Alembic_Import.inspect, the import module initialization function.

There's no release file function.

A workaround we find is to inspect another legit_but_fake.abc file 😃🤔

Trying to inspect empty_string doesn't release the file.

Hope it'll unblock some situations.

[isogae]

Has this issue been resolved?

It seems that file overwriting is not possible in 3ds Max 2022 at least.