So I've been rebuilding or shall I say building from scratch our own Asset Builder. Leaving the native houdini component builder behind. It goes live on pipe today and not being backward compatible, any old assets that we might need to go back to would need to be updated.
Yes! Animation #USD files coming out of Maya now sublayer perfectly with our lookdev USD files. Meaning we have fully shaded animation rendering in Solaris ^_^
OMG! Okay so first 'successful' #USD shot build in #Houdini ! Sure shading on anim isn't working just yet (literally next on my Todo list) but damn this is exciting. The Scene Graph is looking neat with everything in their correct prim paths. Yes!! :D
Been quite focussed on Set Dressing lately in #Solaris. I have managed to build a really great foundation tool for the set dressing artists to work in. They dont need to worry about the #USD technicalities but the result is a dressing.usd file that is sublayered into the set.usd for use down the pipe.
Blender & Houdini working at the same scale, with Maya being the odd one out. Initially we just scaled everything from Maya down by 0.01... but now that we are writing out USD files its time to bring Maya into the fold so that we can standardise
So the Layout Lop looks attractive and artist friendly... but spend some time with it and wow it feels pretty limited. Might use a combination of layout lop, instancer with something like the spraypaint tool and the stagemanager would give us a bit more control.
tried to recreate emty01's knit video. the yarn intersects all over the place and it doesn't loop, so not a success.. but at least I did my first #karmaxpu render #houdini 🇮🇸
Pretty succesful day! Asset review turntable bout halfway done. Some sweet little vex code to setup and position the camera based on the objects scale & scale the backdrop.
Next, setup chrome/matte and a macbath colour chart to follow the camera & remain in the same location in frame no matter the cam position.
Next up is an Asset Review turntable, that will take in the lookdev.usd place it on a backdrop, position a camera according to asset size & rotate it 360 degrees. Generating a usd we can send to the farm.
This is gonna be worth a blog post, coz its getting pretty involved and vex in LOPs is a slightly different beast, with unique usd functions.
So Houdini's standard component builder wrapped into an HDA with a few standardised settings to make lookdevs life easier has become our MVP asset builer. It handles a lot of tasks differently to how we would ultimately like it, but for now with our compressed timeline it'll do the trick!