MaterialX & USD
MaterialX is an open standard for transfer of rich material and look-development content between applications and renderers. Originated at Lucasfilm in 2012, MaterialX has been used by Industrial Light & Magic in feature films such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and by ILMxLAB in real-time experiences such as Trials On Tatooine.
MaterialX addresses the current lack of a common, open standard for representing the data values and relationships required to transfer the complete look of a computer graphics model from one application or rendering platform to another, including shading networks, patterns and texturing, complex nested materials and geometric assignments. To further encourage interchangeable CG look setups, MaterialX also defines a complete set of data creation and processing nodes with a precise mechanism for functional extensibility.
MaterialX is an Open Source project released under a modified Apache license.
Here is a Paper on the subject - http://www.materialx.org/assets/MaterialX Sig2017 BOF Slides.pdf
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It looks different from Maya’s hypershade, maybe that's because hypershade is going to go and be replaced by lookdevx? or maybe it's because its still in development. Anyway interesting times ahead.
There is also talk about using USD (Universal Scene Description) for 3D file formats in all packages. Which means all scenes in all packages will be saved in the same format, some companies are already using it.
Animal Logic launches USDMAYA Plugin as Open Source
http://www.animallogic.com/News/Current-News/USDMAYA
I've been following some of the development on this for a short while and it seems very exciting! Even if it was just for texture transport alone however being able to replicate BxDF's and more seems lucrative.
Any source on the Maya 2019 part? I didn't see it in the presentation you linked to, it seems to be shown working in 2018 there, so we might get it in an update over the next year.
Cheers for the links!
if you store a vray shader in matX only vray is able to render it... its not a shader its a way to manage all nodes for a shader... but the shader could be anything...
I haven't followed too closely, how would you say this compares to USD? I understand that USD is a broad general thing, but MaterialX sounds perhaps more lightweight and specialized? Cool stuff!
Peace and 3D love to you all
http://www.materialx.org/
http://www.materialx.org/assets/MaterialX_Sig2018_BOF_slides.pdf
Kona is a custom build of the games engine Unreal 4 that is supporting MaterialX for rendering.
Has anyone been able to find the video mentioned at the end of the Siggraph presentation "Video: Proof of Concept Demo – ArchViz Workflow"?
ShaderX does now include Pixars realtime USD shader example USD Preview.
https://github.com/jstone-dev/MaterialX/blob/adsk_contrib/dev/documents/Specification/ShaderX.Draft.pdf
https://github.com/autodesk-forks/MaterialX
I hope we se some progress from Unreal in that direction.
https://github.com/materialx/MaterialX/blob/master/documents/DeveloperGuide/ShaderGeneration.md
One day i will be able to open a Shader in Unreal coming from Maya and it will work.
I fear a maya integration will take an other year. There is a lot of precedural shader assignment comming with matX.
Its allready in use in a lot of big studios. Its also part of the USD universe. A lot will change in the next years.
Pipelines wont be DCC centric anymore. They will be build around USD and matX.
The magic is you can save a complex shading network to matX in maya and opne it in Katana Renderman.
It's definitely inevitable. Vfx R&D to in-house production tools eventually become industry standard.
https://www.arnoldrenderer.com/news/press-release-arnold-5-3-gpu/
https://github.com/Autodesk/standard-surface
https://alg-website.s3.amazonaws.com/uploaded-media/matX.webm
http://vimeo.com/355165002
OSL and MDL does work with matX. Its just a rule set how to deal with the resources.
A matX can be describe a OSL shader or a MDL. Its one step above.
http://www.materialx.org/assets/MaterialX_Sig2019_BOF_slides.pdf
And the video.
http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2019/Summer-2019/The-Whole-Look.aspx
https://magazine.substance3d.com/research-a-portable-shader-graph/
The plugin is available on Substance Share.
at 47min
and at 1h 16min
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eyr9d2Pf5gU
And here the Downlad for Designer.
https://share.substance3d.com/libraries/6111
Dont forget to set the Python Path!
We are going to make this the new pipeline this year along with USD and matX. It will be really interesting to see how students work across the different pathways (Games, VFX and 3D Animation), I am sure this will speed up the transitionary cross collaboration by at least tenfold.
Juggling a transition to Houdini at the same time on top of a new pipeline is enough to make anyone's knees wobble. It will all be good in the long run, I'll just keep telling myself that
Universal Scene Description (USD) is an easily extensible, open-source 3D scene description and file format developed by Pixar for content creation and interchange among different tools. As a result of its power and versatility, it’s being widely adopted, not only in the visual effects community, but also in architecture, design, robotics, manufacturing, and other disciplines.
https://developer.nvidia.com/usd?ncid=afm-chs-44270&ranMID=44270&ranEAID=a1LgFw09t88&ranSiteID=a1LgFw09t88-j.JXI0zHO_CS.AAoOGIw5w