#pipelinejournal — Public Fediverse posts

Integrating the #blender asset library directly into our Asset Manager. Dragging & dropping assets for set dressing purposes from the asset library trumps #maya a million times over. Then export to USD, now we're cooking on gas!!!

#pipeline #openusd #animation #pipelinejournal

Due to work needing me to do set dressing in #Maya 2020 🤮 I decided to at least use it as an opportunity to learn #bifrost which has been a pleasure. Writing a bunch of tools around it to make it pipeline friendly, regarding asset use & linking.
Starting to see some great results!

#pipeline #pipelinejournal #python

Yes! That may have taken longer than it should have, but got it working! 💪 Cull Points based on Camera Frustum in vanilla Maya 2020, Bifrost 2.2.0.1!
Its much easier in Maya 2023 and Bifrost 2.6+ but here we are!

#maya #bifrost #camerafrustum #pipelinetd #pipelinejournal

Just added a feature to our USD asset turntable. It now has a helix camera move that gives a closeup render of the asset from bottom to top.

#houdini #solaris #techart #pipelinejournal #openusd #animation

Really enjoying the fact that a #matx file can be sublayered right into a #USD file. This is really making me rethink some of our processes.

#pipeline #pipelinejournal #animation

So with the release of #QuiltiX I have renewed my interest in #MatX. Actually just really keen to do a deep dive into material libraries, storing, reusing and accessing materials across DCCs.

#pipeline #mtlx #pipelinejournal

I'm probably the only person fully testing the user experience of our pipeline. (between projects, so no artists on pipe). It saddens me when I find new obvious bugs coz the dev didnt test. I get it one change can introduce a multitude of issues... but some devs are very good at checking thier work vs others who code and forget.

#pipeline #pipelinejournal #dev #animation

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

#OpenUSD #Python #PipelineTD #PipelineJournal #dag

#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!

#Pipeline #PipelineJournal #Houdini

Super happy to find that #Blender has an equivalent to a UUID.

# Assuming 'obj' is your object
uuid = obj.as_pointer()

Busy working on our Pipeline Asset Validator and need to make sure all names are unique yet conform to our naming standards.

#Pipeline #PipelineJournal

I do also need to do a deep dive into a python tool that was written two years ago for #Maya, that now needs implementing in #Blender Its gonna get wild as the dev who wrote it has since left the company.

#Pipeline #PipelineJournal

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.

Now to go do some #USD digging in the code ^_^

#Pipeline #PipelineJournal #Animation

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.

#Pipeline #PipelineJournal #Animation

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 ^_^

#USD #OpenUSD #Pipeline #PipelineJournal #Houdini

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'.

#USD #OpenUSD #Pipeline #PipelineJournal

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. 💪

#USD #OpenUSD #Pipeline #PipelineJournal

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.

#USD #Houdini #OpenUSD #Pipeline #PipelineJournal​

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 ^_^

#Houdini #OpenUSD #Pipeline #PipelineJournal

Flexing the new #Vex functions to build a #USD Asset Review Turntable for #Houdini

https://maglit.me/solarisassetturntable

#Pipeline #PipelineJournal #OpenUSD

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.

#Pipeline #OpenUSD #Houdini #PipelineJournal #Solaris #USD

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.

#Pipeline #OpenUSD #Python #PipelineJournal #Solaris

Modeling is done in #Maya or #Blender and exported to Alembic. I felt like the first priority was to solidify the lookdev workflow (who already work in Houdini) so it made sense to solve the question of shading first by creating a #USD asset builder. This lets us setup render/proxy geo whilst setting up payloads and render purposes.

#Pipeline #Animation #OpenUSD #PipelineJournal

Its been a busy few months of late. I've been working on rebuilding our pipeline to use #USD as much as possible.

It has been such a buzzword for the last few years, but we opted against it (in 2021) feeling it wasn't quite there yet. However we have been keeping an eye on it, and its certainly reached a point now where we are feeling pretty bullish about moving most of our pipeline over.

#Pipeline #OpenUSD #Animation #PipelineJournal