AMD has announced a USD plugin for Blender. Features include:
- Importing USD files into Blender as “references”. That is a USD file can be imported as part of the scenegraph, but not loaded into Blender’s memory.
- Assembling Blender data and USD data to form a complex scene.
- Exporting assembled USD stages for use in other applications
- Rendering in Blender via the USD Hydra Framework. This is a middle layer for renderers, meaning that once a renderer is adapted to Hydra, it can work in many places including this addon for rendering. Known Hydra render delegates are:
- AMD’s Radeon ProRender
- Hydra’s default Storm delegate
- Intel Embree (cpu) delegate
- Pixar RenderMan delegate.
- Autodesk Arnold
- Otoy Octane
- Redshift
- Cycles
- Intel Ospray
Find out more and download on Github.
So AMD and NVIDIA are working on a different USD addon for blender?! Am In wrong?
As far as I know, Nvidia is contributing to an importer much like the alembic importer, this implementation from AMD is a Hydra viewport implementation which is imo a more powerful approach for interoperability, MaterialX is the cherry on top.
I would imagine that as time goes on they will implement stuff like opinions and versions, for the time being this is in theory a way to get a seamless transition and cooperation between your Houdini Artists doing lighting and set management in LOPS, your Blender artists shading the assets, your Substance artists doing textures, Maya guys animating, etc, each build into the usd description.
Much of this relies on Hydra capable Render engines, this is where cycles and eevee still wont play ball, but you can use in theory pretty much every other engine.
Nvidia is also collaborating with a Hydra implementation for Cycles, it was being worked on by Tangent, and it’s fully open source so much likely it will continue advancing.
Hydra is something important in general and the dev team knows it, so we will probably see it rather sooner than later.
Also right now the Alembic approach is changing, it’s being worked on as a procedural approach, not the classic “import” approach, will see the outcome, but it seems very interesting 🙂
Hey Juan, amazing news!!, do you have a link I can follow on the alembic part?, on Hydra I think it’s a bit speculative right now, usually these are not the priorities of the dev team, but if this is changing that would be amazing and it will help professionalize a part of the software that still fells amateurish, having said that, project blackbird feels a bit orphaned right now, and I don’t know how much the hydra abstraction layer would work with cycles X, hope I’m wrong, and if I am, this would be HUGE news.
I don’t think I’ll need coffee today 🙂
Will see how things go.
I just can say that the interest is there, the devs are aware of the potential benefits and work has been done by Nvidia and Tangent team, so I think it’s the logical evolution as being a Hydra Delegate seems to be the potential future for any render engine that wants to be as efficient and used as possible 🙂
Right now I don’t have a unified link where you can see the realted things to Alembic Procedural work being done, but you can see some things here:
https://developer.blender.org/search/query/n.7QVrXIUxkT/#R
Also Kevin Dietrich, the developer in charge of this, will soon write a blogpost about all this, as it’s stated in the last rendering module meeting notes 🙂
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/2021-08-03-blender-rendering-meeting/19876
So more info will arise soon 🙂
Thank you
this is really cool, it’s important to underscore the Hydra part, since it’s easy to think it’s just an importer.
Does this means anyone can now pop their render engine into this or that those renders can already work with?
should, kind of like with Solaris
That is seriously cool.
I think we can thank AMD for the best Blender feature addition to date.
And they also added MaterialX, meaning that from now the shading nodes will be designed for pro users.
get off the cool aid.
This really is amazing! Hydra and MaterialX nodes in Blender! ILM quality materials made inside Blender, renderable 1:1 with every major renderer out there.
Of course it will be even better if the Blender devs did some contribution to USD as well. It feels like the Blender devs are developing not for their users but for their own production needs and weird workflow they use.