🤖 AYON Pipeline - USD Experimental Integration

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You may know that some Productions are already running in AYON with USD.
But those are about to get superpowers! :fire::muscle:

New Features

:tada: AYON Contribution Workflow

The AYON USD Contribution Workflow allows you to publish directly into an asset’s model, look variants or shot’s department layers, automatically building up the USD structure for you.

Traditionally each department or artist would generate multiple products that downstream departments would load individually. For example, a lighting department may load each character animation product, each FX product individually.

With the contribution workflow, the USD asset and shot stages will combine your individual departments’ contribution.

:tada: AYON USD Resolver

An optimized specialized AYON USD resolver is now available allowing to resolve AYON Entity URIs dynamically at runtime, with high speeds and clever caching.

The resolver comes with a fully optimized pinning support.

The pinning system lets you bake the resolved URIs into a sidecar file and thus ensure no publish will affect the scene while it’s rendering.
It is also designed to give you the ability to load your stages without AYON server interaction and at maximum speed.

Inspecting your stages while debugging and testing is also greatly simplified with the pinned sidecar.

The asset contribution workflow allows writing the contributions with the AYON entity URIs and the loading using the URIs will be managed for you in the DCCs when configured in the project settings.

:tada: Distributing the USD binaries automatically

Using a fast and secure binary repository, we are now able to continuously provide you with up-to-date releases of the compiled USD libraries, including the AYON USD Resolver for all the latest supported DCCs (Houdini, Maya, Unreal)

Please get in touch with us when you need to configure your ayon-usd addon, we’ll be happy to provide you with the necessary informations :key:

@BigRoy, @antirotor and @Lyon-Rosenblatt-Ynpu

:warning: Experimental Note

As amazing as this new integration is, we do need to get your feedback and test it in your conditions before we can deem it production ready.

So all your feedbacks are welcome :mega:

And please don’t use it in production :pray:

Here are some already known issues and limitations:

  • The maya-usd plugin for Maya 2024 and below uses an older version of the USD library. The resolver does work, however the generation of pinning files currently fails due to a lacking UDIM resolve function in the older USD libraries.
  • The Linux version of Unreal is not supported yet, please contact us if you need it.
  • Houdini 20.5+ won’t have the resolver and is disalowed to launch if you have the usd addon enabled in your bundle. That will be fixed soon :tm:

:books: Documentation

Head up to the documentation to find out how to start playing with your new toy! :gift:

:green_heart: Credits

Bringing all the pieces together for this has been a journey.
Congrats for @planck_list, @antirotor, @BigRoy and @mustafa_jafar for mixing all their respective skills and paving the way for a great integration :trophy: and thanks to 22Dogs for making it possible :green_heart: :1st_place_medal:

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