2024-11-14 Pipeline, Assets & I/O Meeting

Meetings
1

Everyone is welcome on the Google Meet linked below every other Thursday, at 17:00 CEST.

Present:

The meeting covers the Pipeline & I/O module topics (USD integration, other external fileformats support…).

Links

Presentation Round

Charles Flèche, Maarten and Sttevan are developers from Ubisoft Montreal. They work on the integration of several DCCs, including Blender, with the Ubisoft Anvil game engine.

Jean is a technical artist and consultant, mainly works with small studios to help them scale down USD and adapt it to their pipelines.

USD

4.4 Targets

  • Scene scaling I/O: still WIP, the export part of the PR is fine, but import is hitting some unexpected issue.
  • Scene instance export: alternative PR, still in progress.
  • Jesse merged the work on displacement support for SurfacePreview and MaterialX. Full support for MaterialX is still pending specs clarifications and USD lib updates.
  • Jesse: Working on animated point instancing import, ther is a PR.
  • Point instancing export: nothing new.
  • Jesse: Still working on a design for Mesh Sequence Cache.

Other on-going topics:

Collection Import/ instancing

There is need for a kickstart meeting, ideally on a Friday afternoon (European time). Bastien will coordinate this with Sergey.

So far there are only preliminary design notes for the Collection Import side of things.

USD Development Branch Retirement

The universal-scene-description branch was used to shape the integration of USD in Blender. However, it has not been maintained for several months now, and is likely not needed anymore. Before fully retiring it, we need to have a full understanding of what is still in it, and what still needs to be ported to main. Micheal will check on this.

Blender Integration With Ubisoft Anvil

Charles Flèche gives a brief techincal demo of how Blender is integrated in game development pipelines using the Anvil engine.

  • Own custom data-base format as source of truth (DCC files are not kept usually).
  • Using USD as exchange format between Anvil and the DCCs.
  • Most transformations are kept separateed from the assets, and applied on the fly when exporting a scene.
  • Several meshes for each asset (shown geometry, collision shape, etc.).
  • To import data in Blender, there is a custom addon to communicate with Anvil (request exports).
    • Generate ‘visualization’ materials in Blender to represent meta-data (e.g. specific properties on the collision mesh), using custom hooks in the USD importer.
    • Requires reliable matches between USD prims and Blender data-blocks (they have a PR to add this feature to Blender).

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 28th November, 17:00 CET/Amsterdam time (your local time: 2024-11-28T16:00:00Z).

The provisional meeting agenda will be linked in the #pipeline-assets-io-module channel before the meeting.

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