USD Branch to Master
Hi,
I was just curious if there was a roadmap for the USD branch being implemented in the master build? It's something that I'm hoping to use extensively in my current workflow and the USD branch (so far) works perfectly for me. At least in terms of outputting USD to an external application.
Edit for clarity:
These are the settings in the USD branch that - as far as I know - don't exist in the master branch. The big ones for me are the exporting cycles materials.
Thanks, Mitchell
4 Comments
Got it, yes, that's different. What do you get with exporting Cycles shaders? MaterialX? I also see they export armatures, that's slated for 4.1.
I don't think it's MaterialX. When it comes to the underlying technical work I'm not entirely sure what's happening. All I know is by being given the option to export cycles shaders in the menus I'm able to load those into Gaffer. I have to do some amount of work in Gaffer to translate it 100% but without the USD branch those shaders are never able to be used in Gaffer. (Although I'd love to be proven wrong if someone else knows how)
4.0 has a great start towards a USD pipeline in Blender. Right now we have a Hydra renderer inside Blender called Storm. In Storm if you switch the export method to USD you can see what other renderers will see upon export with full textures and lighting.
We can now also import USD with materials and all prims correctly as far as I can tell. Exports to Houdini works great, with everything coming in including properly exposed lights, and closely matching materials based on USD Preview. Things that are missing are MaterialX creation and conversion inside Blender, and USD composition with a stage-like paradigm, like we have in Houdini. This areas are already planned here:
projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/100569 projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/100367 projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/68933
Reading those above, things are going well. It seems that Blender's version of a stage will take place via special USD collections with full integration via linking/reference for import, and overridden properties to a new USD file for export. I don't know what the date for these are, but I would not be surprised if it was done for 4.1.
For context I'm trying to export objects and cycles materials to Gaffer. At the moment, even in 4.0, this transition doesn't work. However with the USD branch it does work. I agree the current implementation is good but my question is whether the USD branch has any kind of roadmap release.
I'm mainly asking because using that branched blender version is risky for production but it has that small feature set that's works great and isn't currently in the main blender release.