Building Pixar's USD for Maya

j0pine4

This is kind of an embarrassing question but I'll ask anyway because it's been driving me absolutely crazy trying to figure it out out my own. 

So I was able to follow a blog post on how to  build the USDVIEW to load and view USD Files by following this post:
https://www.manicmachinegames.com/blog/2019/1/10/tutorial-setting-up-and-building-pixars-usd-on-windows

This is a great start but just being able to load in and see USD files isn't exactly productive haha 


The goal is to be able to use this format in a workflow consisting of Maya, Houdini, and katana. I tried following Pixar's instructions of "passing arguments to cmake" from their provided documentation to enable the plugins but I'm just generally confused on the whole process of doing so.

So I suppose my question is "How would I go about enabling these plugins?"

Sorry for not being able to provide a more concise question but being a novice to the Computer Science side of digital art, this is the only way I know of how to ask.

Thank you!

oglu

Have you tried to go with AL_USD.? Its much closer to the native maya one. 

https://github.com/AnimalLogic/AL_USDMaya

If you have questions around the pixar one use the google board. 

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/usd-interest

j0pine4

I did look into the AL_USD and was very impressed with their implementation. But I tried building using their provided documentation with no prevail  

I suppose the real issue I'm having is that the documentation seems to be geared towards the Pipeline TD's which is fine because that's who it's intended for but as someone with only an artistic background, instructions such as "this is enabled in the build with -DPXR_BUILD_MAYA_PLUGIN passed as an option to cmake" don't really make much sense to me. 

But that being said, thanks for the link to the Google board, I'll definitely consult with them about my issues as well.

oglu

Hi have you found a solution? 

oglu

Found a precompiled one.
https://github.com/VictorYudin/saturn/releases

j0pine4

I did find a solution. Mathias Røyrvik helped me out in the Usd Interest group. Apparently, you can pass arguments directly in the python build file.

For example running python build_usd.py --maya --maya-location "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2016" c:\usd in command prompt builds the maya plugin.

python build_usd.py -h will give you lots of helpful info like the arguments to build other plugins as well.

Heres the link to the original post:
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/usd-interest/oKljkGuz5Kw

oglu

New Maya USD plugin combinig the one from Pixar and Animal Logic.
https://github.com/Autodesk/maya-usd/

DavisA

Is there any reason this needs to be so unreasonably complicated?  Why can't there be a simple .pkg installer for anyone on macOS with Maya installed?

Panupat

Probably because they want to focus on the software itself and not on support. Once you start providing .pkg you're opening yourself up to lots of platform+hardware specific issues being reported.

Being very TD oriented has always been a thing with anything Pixar really xD Look how many years it took for Renderman to become more artist friendly.