Created a new hda today. Lets lookdev target specific selections or faces for material binding. Basically makes the process of creating geomsubsets more artist friendly whilst keeping them usd compliant!
Never thought I'd see the day... but we've got a client using Arnold who wants to have both arnold procedurals and usd files rendered via the automated turntable. Took some thinking, but actually got it working one to one. Arnoldproc's take a bit of manhandling to function nicely in solaris. 💪
🏳️ Matt Asay declares #OSS#licensing war over
💅 A perfect #Tailwind#UI for your #AI
🔌 Ivan Kuleshov makes a #PoE Mac mini
🤝 #Apple joins the #OpenUSD alliance
🔧 John D. Cook on picking the worst tool for the job
🎙 hosted by @jerod
So this weeks focus was user testing the edit pipeline/tools. We've been using pymiere - https://github.com/qmasingarbe/pymiere which has been pretty successful tbh. Edit is starting to feel nicely like a first class citizen in our supported DCCs using #OTIO
When not testing edit, I have been hard at work writing code to export our #OpenUSD models so that they perfectly layer in with lookdev. This means I have successfully decoupled LD & MDL usd version files.
#OpenUSD has a prim.GetName() but no prim.SetName()! I know how to edit primpaths via an sdf.layer but having a .SetName() would have meant i could be solving another problem right now instead of bashing my head against moving stage data to a sdf.layer and back!
Okay I have found a way to rename prims and the primpath as required... Its a brute force technique but thankfully having this working opens up so many options for our workflow.
Sadly this due to #Blender not allowing objects at different locations in the scene graph tree to have identical names, like #maya and #houdini
This weeks main goal, to create some FX (fire/smoke/pyro) and confirm that these assets travel down the new USD pipe correctly. Confirm that lookdev receives & can use all attributes required, etc.
This probably & largely involves prepping my asset build tool to accept different formats correctly, and accessing primvars.
Shoutout to @dhruvgovil and @Drwave, as well as Jon and Alexander for all their work on #openUSD at Apple. Awaiting new documentations and schemes in the coming months.
The roll out of my new Asset Builder has gone amazingly smoothly. 💪 The #lookdev team really prefer its workflow, cleaner and simpler for the artist. This is always my goal, 'Let Artists be Artists' they dont care about all this tech ^_^
Creating a payload feels oddly complicated in #Houdini but once you have it setup its pretty straight forward!
Here I am creating two reference usd layers, one for _geo.usdc and one for _mtl.usdc (off top screen) that are combined into a single payload layer _payload.usd.
The 'root_component_prim' is simply creating '/asset_name' of kind 'Component'.
Its been interesting working with USD and seeing how it can all be layered. The #Houdini component builder was not letting me store arnold render settings in the _mtl.usdc so we used the _extras.usdc. Having switched to my own builder we can now store those details in the _mtl.usdc meaning one less file to keep track of when applying materials to animation. 💪