Maya USD path management #4354
Description
USD has been a thing for more than 5 years now.
Me as TD looked upon works of Animal Logic, Arx Anima, Swiss international, Framestore, Dneg.
In all of these pipelines one thing was common:
Scene structure as it is set in scene build/layout stage is absolute holiness!
Let say we have the asset, and asset is called ship, structure of the asset would be as follows:
ship
geo
proxy
proxy geos...
render
render geos...
mtl
materials...
Then when these assets get referenced in shot they get fed into some meta groups:
Vehicles
ship01
proxy
proxy geos...
render
render geos...
mtl
materials...
So let say in Houdini, if I would destroy that ship, whatever I do with it, if i keep paths as I got them, when my FX usd is being sublayered in LGT scene, everything will be working normally. Work of LDEV in the asset stage will be not ruined by my FX work.
Then we go to current Maya worfklow.
Where you would have usd groups, and then load ship asset as Maya reference, and animate it. Upon exporting it as usd, suddenly structure changes:
Vehicles
ship01
cache1
proxy
proxy geos...
render
render geos...
mtl
materials...
I mean what is cache1? Why o why we would want our path structures to be changed without even asking us.
Not to mention that exporting ship01 as usd, makes cache1 first primitive in the export, and stripping namespaces from reference sometimes doesn't work.
Then someone might ask me why don't you just convert whole stage into regular Maya geometry and export from there. Currently I'm doing that, since I don't see any other solution. Regular USD export seems to be much better than this USD prims + maya reference prims combination.
Friendly suggestion would be to look into presentations from above studios from bunch of Houdni hives, and don't try to reinvent the wheel.