Use the PDC File Format

The PDC file is used by Maya's particle disk caching and startup cache. It is a binary file that holds one frame's worth of data for a single particle object. The readpdb program cannot read this format, but we provide this information here in case you want to write your own readers.

4 Characters indicating that this is a PDC file. This will be the 4 characters “P”, “D”, “C”, “ “.
1 Integer indicating the file format version number.
1 Integer holding bit information about whether the values stored in the file are BIG_ENDIAN or LITTLE_ENDIAN.
2 Integers holding extra bit information that various file format version might decide to use.
1 Integer indicating the number of particles represented in this file.
1 Integer indicating the number of attributes that have values stored in this file.
N records, where N is the number of attributes. Each record holds all of the particles' data. The record is formatted as follows:
	1 Integer indicating the length of the attribute's name
	M Characters indicating the name of the attribute, where M is the length of the name.
	1 Integer indicating the type of data for the current attribute. The following maps the values to the data types: 0 ---> Integer 1 ---> Integer Array 2 ---> Double 3 ---> Double Array 4 ---> Vector 5 ---> Vector Array
	P * B Bytes representing the data for this attribute, where P is the number of particles or 1 for non-array data and B is the number of bytes needed to represent the data type.