Glimpse

Introduction

Welcome to Animal Logic’s USD ALab.

TL;DR: Download ALab and open entry.usda to get started.

Applications with USD support, such as Maya-2022+, Houdini-18.5+ and many more should be able to load and render the provided assets.

For quick preview and inspection, USDView is a great starting point.

Glimpse (AL proprietary) Houdini (Karma) Maya (VP2/render purpose) UsdView (Storm/render purpose)
Glimpse Houdini screenshot Maya 2022 screenshot UsdView (render purpose)

Documentation

About ALab

The ALab data set is the Animal Logic interpretation and implementation of real-world production and pipeline concepts in USD.

It includes over 300 fully surfaced assets derived from an internally produced project, rather than created from scratch as a “USD reference implementation.” It consequently exhibits the complexities (and some of the messiness) of real production assets. If one were to build a USD structure for the sole purpose of showcasing USD, it would lead to a different result.

The entry.usda stage places you in a shot with a structure similar to how we use it at Animal Logic. Since no shot is complete without animation, included are two animated characters, each with some level of proceduralism. Due to this proceduralism requiring some custom schemas for our internal Glimpse renderer, we have provided a hint on what these procedurals create in a separate baked_procedurals package. This is the “cached” content that would be sent to the renderer per-frame.

For “production style rendering” we also provide an additional package texture_pack with multi UDIM, mipmapped 4K OpenEXR textures.

We hope that this is the starting point for future contributions to showcase new ideas for discussion, promotion, and hopefully adoption.

Why did Animal Logic create these assets?

We created them to be used internally, primarily to provide client-free IP data for:
- Training of Developers, TDs and Artists
- Discussion Reference (“something to point at”)
- Production / Stability Testing
- Tool / Unit Testing
- Pipeline Modifications Testing
- Workflow Experiments

What do we hope you’ll do with them?

The same as we do internally. Their intended usage includes, but is not limited to:
- Training and Education (Schools, University, Courses etc)
- Discussion Reference (USD-interest, GitHub issues etc)
- CI/Build Testing (software vendors)
- Feature Testing (software vendors)
- Workflow Experiments and white paper proposals

Working with Available Packages

ALab

Start with the default ALab package, load entry.usda in your application and see the content.

If your application does not set the start and end frame automatically (e.g. when using a sublayer node in Houdini or Create USD Stage from File in Maya), set the frame range from 1004 to 1057.

You can also view through the shot camera on prim path: /root/camera01/GEO/renderCam_hrc/renderCam_buffer/renderCam_srt/renderCam.

Baked Procedurals

Unzip the contents on top of the default ALab package to merge the baked_procedurals folder, overriding the previously empty baked_procedurals/main.usda file.

After merging, your contents from the baked_procedurals folder should look like below:

replace_texture_pack

Texture Pack

We provide the textures to allow for testing of rendering in a more realistic, production-like configuration and encourage the creation of renderer-specific materials.

Move the fragment folder from this package onto the fragment folder of the vanilla asset package and override all conflicting files, which already exist.

replace_texture_pack

Trailer Cameras

Unzip the contents on top of the default ALab package to merge the camera_packages folder, overriding the previously empty camera_packages/main.usda file.

After merging, your contents from the camera_packages folder should look like below:

replace_cameras

Note: These cameras are a specially built package and are not representative of the structure used in the pipeline.

All the shot cameras appear in the stage under the prim /root/cameras.

From the Camera > Select Camera menu, choose the required shot camera.

select_cameras

Contact & Feedback

We are proud to have been accepted into the Academy Software Foundation Digital Production Example Library. As such we have moved further conversations to the #assets-alab slack channel.