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) |
---|---|---|---|
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.
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
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
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
.
BasisCurves
) for the fur & cloth of the characters. 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:
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.
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:
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.
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.