AYON Modelling Workflow

General
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Hello,

I’m trying to figure out a modelling workflow with AYON.

If you have experience in Maya Modelling and AYON, will you share how you handle textures reference?

How do you handle textures reference that can supports multiple Operating systems such as Windows, Mac, and Linux?

Regards,
Tu

2

Interesting question - what in particular are you unsure about?

It’s something that I don’t often see completely managed by a pipeline (not in our studio at least) because it’s usually just the modeler putting images where he wants it in the way he/she likes it. Nowadays often also with tools like xref.

What are your particular concerns with regards to multiple platforms? Is it multiple people opening the same workfile?

Maybe some of this already helps you somewhat along the way:

  • You can publish some images, like references, to the asset via Tray Publisher.
  • You can load those images (managed) to e.g. Maya as image planes or texture file nodes
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Does using environment variables help you ?
For reference, you can define as much env vars as you want in AYON settings.

4

Hello @BigRoy and @mustafa_jafar,

I’m particularly interested in understanding how different products of the publishing process can be efficiently combined later in the animation pipeline.

For example, I’ve followed the guide Maya Artist Docs | AYON Docs, where a publish produced a model and a look for the geo and texture, respectively.

When moving into layout or animation, we reference the model and use the look manager to assign the look to that model. However, for a layout or animation artist, this seems like an additional step that to get the model ready for use.

Is there a way to reference a fully packaged asset (model, texture, rig…) directly during the layout stage?

I’m also curious about how to manage variations in file paths when referencing textures, especially given that our studio relies on Maya’s relative path system (“//”) to accommodate different paths for remote artists versus in-house teams.

For example, a remote artist might use C:/dropbox/car_project//textures/red.tex, where Maya can use image searching to find P:/car_project/textures/red.tex, which is the path in our studio.

When I use AYON to create new assets, the Maya’s Project Workspace is set to the project’s “Directory template”, where Maya’s usage of relative path won’t be available.

If I’m understanding @mustafa_jafar correctly, would it be better to set up a system environment variable like CAR_PROJECT = “C:/dropbox/car_project” and reference textures as “CAR_PROJECT/textures/red.tex” to handle path variations more flexibly?

Regards,
Tu

5

Currently, without USD, no. At the same time, it also wouldn’t make much sense since often the product from layout/animation scenes ends up being things like Alembic caches or other types of pointcache (geometry) files. As such, yes - your layout may have loaded everything but progressing that on to e.g. lighting department with any local scene changes to the geometry or alike may be very tricky. USD solves that, but the Maya USD workflow admittedly is lacking a bit in that area (unrelated to AYON) but has been seeing good improvements in recent maya-usd updates.

Anyway, usually the layout/animation teams load model products and rig products. In our studio, it’s rare for layout/animation teams to have to apply looks, because for the majority of our work it’s not needed (OR production render shaders aren’t nice for viewport display anyway so they are useless; and our studio is too small to create and maintain both preview shaders and render shaders which may be different in series/feature film productions)

So, what happens is that from layout/animation caches are generated, e.g. pointcaches for sets or animation products for rigs. Lighting departments load these caches and/or any FX department caches, use look manager to batch apply all looks at once and that means the lighting scene is ready.

For longer running productions we also use Workfile Templates to e.g. have a lighting scene template get build on starting a lighting task which auto-loads all products, groups them as we’d like and then applies the published looks directly. Meaning the artist would only need to run the “build workfile” and it’s ready for rendering.

Note that USD workflow changes a lot of this, it allows propagating assets with shaders in very different ways which does make it very nice to propagate shaders through both layouts/animation AND over to lighting maintaining its integrity. However, e.g. loading that into Maya with decent viewport previews for the shaders we’ve found still lacks a lot - so you may still not see what you’d like for complex production shaders. Nor does e.g. a maya rig actually use USD data, hence a rig would still need its own preview shaders. But layouts of models, yes - that’d definitely work!

For this you may use two features:

  • Ayon Sitesync: Provides a way to sync published files between different sites, like studio site and remote freelancer location’s site
  • Maya Dirmap: Maya has a feature call dirmap which can relink paths automatically so that one path like P:/ may map as C:/dropbox on the other machine (Ayon has this in the settings to configure as well I believe.)

However, happy to hear from others how they are doing this.

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Yes, Basically, I was referring to the same topic discussed in Maya - User prefs and studio prefs

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