Wrapped up the #Lookdev texture work in #Adobe#SubstancePainter for the front and back of the #NES#Zelda cartridge. Generic "Gray" edition, now to work on the gold cart. Can easily swap NES game cartridge labels now. The Adventure of Link next?
A project that generates real world meshes in Houdini using the Google API. My python library for handling GLTF files is one little piece of it which is amazing.
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.
I'm using #blender for the first time in about 4 years (and used to just use it to cut out complex UV maps for video projection mapping), and wow, with the #eevee realtime rendering engine is a game changer. and the UI has become so much easier to navigate in this time. it's like if #touchdesigner and a #houdini reunited and became merged as one.
#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!
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.
Just to add insult to injury, #Maya uses 'map1' as its default, but auto renames to st on #USD export. So whilst exporting alembics from #Blender we then had two UV maps in Maya 'UVMap' and 'map1' when those files ultimately made it to rigging and then down to #Houdini#Solaris we now have 'st' and 'st1'.
Spent friday debugging why mtl.usd wasn't being applied correctly to anim.usd and well it came down to UV names.
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. 💪