This project tracks the integration of the Universal Scene Description package.
Progress report, calls for contribution, design proposal are communicated on the bf-usd mailing list.
The roles (and responsibilities) from the Blender team are:
- Sybren Stüvel: project coordinator
- Brecht van Lommel: lead engineer (technical design)
- Francesco Siddi: lead product (functional specs & requirements)
Dalai Felinto is general development coordinator and will keep track of resource planning.
Michael Kowalski (NVidia) is actively contributing in the temporary USD branch
Meeting Notes and Announcements
Resources
- https://github.com/ColinKennedy/USD-Cookbook
- https://github.com/vfxpro99/usd-resources
- The branch where development happens
Planned Features
Note: each item of this list will be referencing a patch or a design task.
- Instancing import: Import USD scene instances as Blender collection instances.
- Instancing export: Extend the existing instancing option to support exporting arbitrary object hierarchies as USD scene instances. Additional support for exporting Blender particle systems as USD point instancers.
- Environment map IO: Logic to convert between USD dome lights and Blender world materials, including environment textures.
- Unit conversion scene scale: Automatically scale the scene for unit conversion on import and export (e.g., scale the imported objects based on the USD’s meters per unit value).
- Curve export.
- Armature export: Export armatures and skinned meshes to USD skeletons and skeletal animations.
- Light unit conversion: Experimental code to convert between light intensity units in Nits and Blender’s light energy units, on import and export.
- Transform operator options: Option to save transforms to USD as the combination of scale, rotate and translate operators, where the rotation can be expressed as Euler angles or a quaternion.
- Export to USD shader nodes: Convert Blender shader nodes to UsdPreviewSurface nodes, MDL material nodes or a custom USD representation of Cycles shaders.
- Import MDL materials: Convert MDL materials to Blender shader networks.
- Texture export: An option to save textures to a directory relative to the USD being exported, using either absolute or relative asset paths. This feature works with UDIM tiles as well as packed and in-memory “baked” textures.
- Option to specify a default primitive on export.
- Option to add a root primitive on export. This option adds a single prim as the parent of all exported prims.
Near term work in progress includes:
- Option to export meshes as individual USD “prop” files that are referenced in the scene.