So this week I cloned down the #blender repo and for the first time in my life successfully built a c project! I honestly did not expect it to work so smoothly. Props to the blender devs who put that all together.
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. 💪
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.
So with the review turntable out of the way, its time to look into Set Dressing.
First step, write some python code that takes the SRTs written to a .json from Maya and read them into Houdini creating and positioning them via an Asset Reference node, writing that out to a usd file we can use in Set Dressing.
Asset Turntable is up and running! 💪
Houdini lets you do quite a bit that is not supported directly in USD, so had to work around those... but in the end its working perfectly creating a USD file we can submit directly to the farm.
Been starting to think about using custom attribs on objects in #Blender to setup #USD prim types and purposes. Then setting those values upon .usd export. Would need to call the current exporter from my code, but feels very doable. Could even do the same on import. 🤔
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.