VFX facility Animal Logic has released USD ALab, a free USD asset that the company describes as “the first real-world implementation of a complete USD production scene. see the promo video below.
I gave it a try in the latest Houdini19.5 and Solaris. the scene crashed randomly or was super laggy. I gave a shot with Karma and Arnold renderer. the experience in Lops is still awful and lots of features are still missing, just frustrating.
I’ve opened the scene with GafferHQ, they experience is quite good and feels super snappy. the downside, USD is still not fully supported. I decided to write some scripts to convert USD files into native gaffer shaders inside of gaffer. I am planning to great a modular converting tool to transfer shader between Arnold, Cycles or the upcoming open-source release of MoonRay from Dreamworks animation.
it seems some scene has a lot of Animal Logic-specific settings. like camera projection, UDIM textures etc. issues which I have to solve. I’ve converted the EXR textures into a tx mid-map file which adds another 70GB of data, but this should help to more efficient renderings within Arnold renderer.
I will post more progress as I go along
Heribert Raab 