A few (probably very basic, I apologize) general questions.
Is there a task that best matches rendering a shot? Is Lighting the one most people use?
How can I edit the hierarchy of folders after creating them in the web interface? For example if I create a top level asset, but later want to put that inside of a shot folder.
Is there some way to infer which actions should / shouldn’t work across DCCs? For example, from my previous post, texturing in Blender and exporting to USD and then loading everything in Houdini does not currently work. Are there ‘common’ workflows that as someone without experience actually working on a pipeline can find? If my goals are to understand Blender and USD, is it fair to say the following pipelines are “common” or “typical” in the sense that someone else using AYON has done them before?
Blender Pipeline: Do everything (model, texture, rig, animate, lookdev, light…) in Blender
Yes. However, you’re free to change your default task types/names in AYON studio settings if you’d like.
Moving paths of in-production folders is usually not sensible - because all files and published products generated to and loaded from those original folder locations would need to be then suddenly using remapped paths.
As such, AYON exposes very little tools to ‘move’ these around because it’s usually not a sane thing to do in production.
Texturing is often done with the Substance Painter integration - or textures are somehow ingested through another app and ingested via Tray Publisher.
The actual lookdev/surfacing - especially when going the USD route - will most likely be done in Houdini using Solaris.
In Maya LookdevX could be used or dedicated export options of certain renderers that can export regular native maya materials, etc. to a USD format - however those workflows haven’t been explored much (no users) and likely may need custom coding for it to be fully operational.
In Blender - you’d be very reliant on how any material local to Blender may be converted to a USD equivalent. Which I’d say, is far from a production-ready approach and will definitely present errors in AYON since it’s never been tested either.