Workflow feedback Tweet

[JPeg]

Hey all,

I've been testing out some more workflows recently and I've got a bit of feedback to share; mainly using a lot of Octane Standalone (to access development builds, full feature set and because the scene updates are a bit faster).

I find it useful to assemble a scene in Solaris, particularly since I'm authoring all my assets in Houdini. I tend to write out all mesh geometry as alembic files and VDB volumes, both of which can be natively read as a sublayer reference into a USD scene. I also have a lot of camera control in Solaris and can create animations and constraints easily.

In and ideal world, I'd continuing to work and export images from Solaris without going through Octane Standalone and development build plugins would drop same day as standalone. Since that isn't exactly a feasible reality the next best thing would be to work as much as possible in Solaris, write out a single USD file, import it into standalone and make final adjustments there.

But even in other workflows where I might want to move my work to another package where Octane is supported, like Unreal for example, then USD is perfect for that.

With that in mind I've noticed the following when dealing with USD:
* While the camera and its Octane specific settings are included in the USD file, in standalone there is no way to access or modify these settings
* Volumes don't retain their frame sequence settings, you end up with just a single frame where the playbar was in Houdini (i.e. $F4.vdb in the file input is not respected)
* Reference only USD don't work, this is a biggie!!! One of the main benefits to the USD workflow is referencing other USD files (or supported files like alembic and vdb).
* Object layer settings (like setting light masks, camera/shadow visibility) are lost when the USD file is read in standalone.