Adopting Alembic

Alembic is an open source scene information interchange framework. Alembic distills complex, animated scenes into non-procedural, application-independent, baked geometric results. It stores only the baked information and not how that information was obtained. For instance, a fully rigged and animated character would have its vertices efficiently stored for each frame of the animation but the control rig itself would not be stored. You can export to Alembic from most popular 3D applications.

For more information on Alembic, see http://code.google.com/p/alembic/.