[Bf-usd] USD importer progress

[Michael A Kowalski]

Hello everyone,

To follow up on Francesco's email from last week, I'd like to briefly report the status of the work on the USD importer.  The task description can be found here:

https://developer.blender.org/T81257

The corresponding git.blender.org branch is usd-importer-T81257.

This is very much a work in progress.  As per the task description, the initial implementation is loosely based on the design of the Alembic importer.  In fact, in many places the USD importer code follows the corresponding Alembic implementation very closely.  The basic strategy is to iterate over the USD stage to instantiate "reader" classes that translate USD primitives to Blender objects.

Here are the main features implemented so far:


  *   Basic support for importing USD meshes with UVs and normals.
  *   Work in progress on material import:  creation of material slots and assignment of material indices.  Existing Blender material matching the names of USD materials will be automatically assigned to the corresponding slots.
  *   Experimental support for instancing:  instanceable USD mesh primitives can be imported as shared meshes in Blender.  (However, the importer doesn't yet handle converting USD point instancer primitives.)


I consider this work to be a prototype which can be used to motivate discussion of the design.   I'm quite open to redesigning and refactoring the code as needed based on feedback and testing, of course.   Needless to say, many features are missing and there are opportunities for optimization.

No doubt, this code overlaps with the importer implemented by Tangent, as previously described by Blazej.

I very much welcome everyone's feedback and questions, and will continue to post status updates on this project in the coming weeks.

Thank you!

Michael

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