Pixar Open USD

Pipeline Integrations
1

Hi all

Is there an integration with Pixar Open USD?
I’ve looked on the shotgrid website and there’s scant information - lots of marketing though.

John

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2

Bump. Anyone know or care to comment from autodesk?

@Ricardo_Musch do you happen to know?

3

By “integration with Open USD” do you mean support for the format?
Since USD is now used in many different programs, there is some support for it yes.
You have to be more specific, though.

4

Thanks for your reply @mmoshev .

I think I am trying to understand what Open USD is. I think I understand the concept. Are they files that one just exports?

Would I have to update files and republish using shotgrid if I make changes?

5

Its a new interchange format and you could indeed use it in the pipeline as your interchange format of choice between various software.

Toolkit can absolutely be made to import/export USD files if required by the workflow, it just needs to be built into the process.

6

@Ricardo_Musch Legend

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7

I’m not entirely sure that SG/Flow should handle that. AFAIK composition arcs are done on the flight on the dcc. What can be done is using USD API to get information from the stage and register on Flow.

8

@guilherme that was the reason I was confused.

In short: USD is an open format for scenes. It can be used inside Houdini, Nuke, etc.
You need to perform the composition of USDs in these programs.

ShotGrid does allow you to e.g. publish USDs (out of the box, I think), but not manipulate them.

9

Flow can publish USDs the same way as any other filetype: by registering on the database. The actual work is done by the dcc, the toolkit just triggers the action inside the dcc.
I don’t think it would be wise to manipulate the usd layer structure at publish time - maybe just adding aditional attributes or just getting info from the layers (like frame-range) to register on Flow. Both would need the usd api.

10

Yeah, I was trying more to distinguish the two use cases, but didn’t do a great job :slight_smile:

The crux is that editing USD is done in DCCs. ShotGrid can publish USD.
There is also a nice open toolset for manipulating USD from Python or C++.

11

Hi,

We are currently starting to use this opensource usd asset resolver in our shotgrid pipeline: GitHub - LucaScheller/VFX-UsdAssetResolver: Usd Asset Resolver Reference Implementations.

In a nutshell : an usd file can have references to other usd files. Those references can be written as filepaths the traditional way, but, using a custom usd asset resolver plugin, you can use some naming scheme to define the references, and the asset resolver plugin translates this to actual filepaths.

For example, in a usd file, instead of a reference to /someshare/somedir/someusd.usd
I’m using :

@template=usd_asset_layer&Asset=Cataclysme&Step=FX&task_name=myfx&sg_asset_type=Prop&extension=usd@

I made custom scene breakdown hooks to be able to change the versioning on the fly. The interesting thing with this is that you could have nested usd, and change the version of some deeply nested usd file without having to republish the intermediate steps

This could become part of the official toolkit

Another thing I would like to see is a tookit app to view and inspect USD files. A hybrid of RV and USDView of some sorts. I can imagine viewing a USD file and drawing some notes on it, like we can do with reviewables…

There are lots of opportunities for development here, and certainly some areas that would benefit lots of users of ShotGrid.

I hope the ShotGrid dev team could convince their managers to spend some time on this, between the usual efforts of name rebranding :slight_smile:

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