[Bf-usd] Proposal to integrate Hydra into Blender

[Sybren A. Stüvel]

Hi Brian,

On Tue, 21 Dec 2021 at 21:57, Brian Savery via Bf-usd <bf-usd at blender.org>
wrote:

> We recently released our "Blender Hydra Radeon ProRender" addon and think
> this could have some real value being added directly into Blender.
> https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/BlenderUSDHydraAddon Or if
> you want watch a video on it:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7l8rVUvMbs
>
Congratulations on the release! The video looks pretty impressive, nice
work.


> Some todo's I see for bringing this into mainline.
>
What does "mainline" mean? Do you mean Blender's master branch?

1.  Aligning with the current import / export USD work that is being done.
> We currently translate the blender data via python and the USD python
> binding but obj.  Moving this directly into blender's code where it could
> use the internal C api would be advantageous.
>
It would indeed be advantageous to work together with Michael Kowalski
(NVIDIA) on this. He's coauthor and maintainer of Blender's USD importer,
and he's actively working on improvements on both import and export. This
mailing list, as well as the #pipeline-assets-io-module channel
<https://blender.chat/channel/pipeline-assets-io-module> on Blender Chat,
would be good channels to sync up.

2.  Writing a proper scene delegate for Blender's data to Hydra.
> 3.  Making the MaterialX workflow a bit simpler.  It might/should be
> possible to just use blender's nodes and translate them at render time to
> MaterialX nodes.
> 4.  Integrating the USD data representation in Blender a bit more
> tightly.  Using the empty objects for each USD prim is a bit awkward.
>
How does this relate to the current work on Blender in this area? I'm
thinking about tasks like T68933: Collections for Import/Export
<https://developer.blender.org/T68933>.

Cheers,
Sybren
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