Maya USD and matX
polycount lvl 666
First Maya 2020 USD binary is ready.
Thats a huge step for maya in the right direction.
Unreal and Unity are both ready to load USD Stages.
https://github.com/Autodesk/maya-usd/releases/tag/v0.1.0
MaterialX 1.37 Specs is also realeased. I hope Substance will show something this week.
https://github.com/materialx/MaterialX/releases/tag/v1.37.0
Thats a huge step for maya in the right direction.
Unreal and Unity are both ready to load USD Stages.
https://github.com/Autodesk/maya-usd/releases/tag/v0.1.0
MaterialX 1.37 Specs is also realeased. I hope Substance will show something this week.
https://github.com/materialx/MaterialX/releases/tag/v1.37.0
Replies
The core idea behind USD is that it does live on the harddrive.
You can open an USD Stage in Maya and work at the same time in Houdini with it.
Open the Stage in Unreal and every time someome does hit save it appears in Unreal.
Read more here.
https://renderman.pixar.com/stories/pixars-usd-pipeline
I will post my further testings next week.
UVs are working now in Unreal.
https://github.com/Autodesk/maya-usd/releases/tag/v0.2.0
https://github.com/Autodesk/maya-usd/releases/tag/v0.5.0
A nice loading time comparison.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Content/USDinUE4/index.html
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/12/15/omniverse-open-beta-available/?ncid=so-twit-60023-vt08&linkId=100000024059818#cid=_so-twit_en-us
https://makeanything.autodesk.com/usd
Interesting talk from Remedy
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17BgRTWr3XIlMUpqXv_ytcOGJZu9sV2pl/view
Looks like Remedy is all in on USD.
https://remedy-entertainment.github.io/USDBook/usd_primer.html
MatX appears to be dead in the water - we couldn't find authoring support that looks anywhere near current or supported. Do you know of anything that supports material authoring ?
MDL seems to have supplanted it - imo this is preferable anyway.
ASWF has a recently added MaterialX Graph Editor https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/MaterialX/pull/1169
There's also LookDevX in beta, currently connected with Maya.
Lucas Film said they're planning on releasing their MaterialX editor as open source.
Houdini has MaterialX support.
Also the ASWF has regular calls open to all, featuring USD and MaterialX developers and latest info.
https://academysoftwarefdn.slack.com/archives/C0230LWBE2X/p1670355921907039?thread_ts=1670355921.907039&cid=C0230LWBE2X notes from the Dec 6 MaterialX call
https://wiki.aswf.io/display/WGUSD/USD-MaterialX more resources
The thing with matX is that they changed the scope. Its now part of the USD universe. They have to work together. First they made both compatible. I expect the fruits of this mid 2023.
Current maya-usd version already supports MaterialX, you'll even see the mtlx shaders previewing in the viewport of maya. Additionally Arnold renderer also started supporting materialx from USD.
So you can already start using USD in maya with materialX, and render using Arnold. But when it comes to editing/authoring shaders, as @oglu said, we should have what we need by 2023 for that. It took much longer than other DCCs like Houdini solaris, but I think we will get something that will be easy to use for maya users, looking at this for example : https://github.com/Autodesk/maya-usd/discussions/2744
Toolbag Beta now has USD import/export: https://marmoset.co/toolbag/beta-history/
It's the authoring of materials and translation to other renderers that's important from my perspective. Based on that, it seems like a non-starter at the moment
I guess we wait til next year and see if it's worth revisiting - I prefer MDL as a concept anyway so maybe I'll just ignore it forever 😁
MaterialX is able to store the materials in MDL. They work together. MaterialX is the glue that connects the geo to the shader. The shader itself can be in MDL, OSL or materialX. Its a guide to make it work. But there are multiple ways to use it. Similar to USD there are many flavors.
Yeah It's not really an MDL vs Mtlx issue, MDL can already be used as a backend to MaterialX. One of the greatest benefits to MaterialX usage for me is the ability to access your materials so easily without any DCC or prerendered previews, either using the MaterialXviewer or any package that has support for MaterialX, even the web browser ! https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_nodes_loader_materialx
I think i get it.
What I'm after is a fairly high level material definition language that can be used outside of USD to give us write once, render anywhere capabilities. I get the impression Matx could do that but it's not what it's for
What are the most common tools you would like to use for rendering. I assume if its ready matx could be the solution even without USD.
This is our goal too. MaterialX is probably the best hope to achieve that in my view. One requirement for us is being able to use the same material library for both real time and offline rendering, and it's becoming possible ! for example recently Unreal Engine 5.1 added MaterialX support for standardSurface, Omniverse can also read mtlx directly now from USD. It seems that things have been converging quiet well in MaterialX support lately. So the upcoming version of Maya will hopefully make it easy for artists to benefit from this.
Output will primarily be to custom tools but also hlsl/glsl for painter, designer , Houdini, Maya etc.
This is less about building a material library than it is about building surface shaders without the need for graphics engineers.
We can compile an MDL file including custom functions down to our fragment language already so that bit's 'known to work' what hasn't been poked much is integration into the DCCs
I'd been assuming up to now that matX and MDL are interchangeable in function - that seems to have been a misinterpretation.