Everyone is welcome on the Google Meet linked below every other Thursday, at 17:00 CEST.
Present:
- Bastien Montagne
- Charles Wardlaw
- Jean-Silas Moor
- Jesse Yurkovich
- Micheal Kowalski
The meeting covers the Pipeline & I/O module topics (USD integration, other external fileformats support…).
Links
- Google Meet
- Previous meeting
- Next meeting
- Pipeline & I/O module
- USD project
- #Pipeline & I/O module chat channel
- #USD chat channel
USD
4.4 Targets
- Scene scaling I/O: still WIP, Charles had no time to work on the PR recently.
- Jesse has been working on a WIP implementation for the Mesh Sequence Cache design, has published a WIP PR.
- Micheal created a PR for scene graph instancing export, somewhat an alternative solution to the other PR.
- Michael has a WIP PR for a new hook on material import.
- Jesse has been working on the manual for IO USD options.
- Jesse has been working on completing support for subdivision in the importer (adding e.g. edge crease support).
Collection Import/Instancing
Summary of Friday 29th November meeting, with Charles, Jesse, Sergey and Bastien:
Collection import end goal is to add more flexibility and control over external data usage (both linked from blendfiles, or imported from other formats). The ultimate idea to have refined control hover what is imported, how, and when:
- Add ability to select a source file, but also (when supported by the format) a sub-path to the root of the imported data.
- Add choices to do a full import, only import an empty representaion of data hierarchy, or nothing into Blender itself.
- Add control on when import and/or reload happens (at blendfile opening, on user demand, etc.).
The initial step with be a very simple prototype, only storing a reference (path) to the external USD data.
Bastien will write a design task, and work with Jesse for the initial implementation.
This will allow Charles to have a sane base to work on delegating the rendering of this ‘instanced’ USD root path to Hydra, and composite it into Blender’s viewport. Sergey will be available to help with that aspect of the project too.
Asset resolver and Schemas for Blender USD integration?
Jean-Silas brings up these topics as they are often an issue for small studios and teams to use or integrate USD in their pipeline.
- Currently, Blender ships with the default USD resolvers.
- There are been discussions in among USD/game groups to create a simple, easy to set-up opensource asset resolver, able to use relative paths or URIs and resolve them based on external settings (like a configuration text file).
- From Blender side, this has some synergies with the topic of better support for the concept of ‘projects’.
- Technically seems trivial to add once there is one implemented (‘drop-in’ replacement).
- Could be shipped with Blender or exist on the extension platform.
- USD schemas could also live on extension platforms.
- Projects could then have dependencies on extensions, including some USD asset resolver, schemas, etc.
Other
- UFBX: Bastien created a task about adding initial WIP experimental usage of this library for Blender’s FBX importer code.
Next Meeting
Due to the end of the year context, it will be in three weeks instead of two.
The next meeting will be on Thursday 2nd January, 17:00 CET/Amsterdam time (your local time: 2025-01-02T16:00:00Z).
The provisional meeting agenda will be linked in the #pipeline-io-module channel before the meeting.