USD issues

[Measter]

Upgrading to the latest nightly for VRAY 5 fixed a ton of the issues and enabled me to use the new Maya 2023 USD features.

Still having issues with USD files that have USDPrevewSrf materials freezing the viewport when translating the USD data to Maya data via import or using the new "edit as maya data" feature (null pointer memory crashes). Unfortunately I can't test to see if this issue persists in VRAY 6, however using VRAY materials and checking the plugin configuration appears to solve the problem for now. For compatibility reasons we would love to use the preview surface. (We want to use Maya/VRAY to do factory layouts, then send them in one click to Unity via PiXYZ. I know the VRAY/Unity thing is a sore point, so I'm sorry I brought it up.

I'm also very excited for Maya 2024 and MayaUSD versions, but given our companies slow turnaround on software updates, I image I'll get them sometime in 2026...

Thank you yolov for all your direct support, it's greatly appreciated!

[yolov]

Excellent news!
There's a good chance that editing USDPreviewSurface as Maya data is something out of our hands, so it might be best to report to GitHub (or check if it's already reported -- I couldn't find anything in their list).
If there's V-Ray data in the file - then it could be related to V-Ray, but we don't handle the import of UsdPreviewSurface, Maya does.

When exporting to USD, you can switch to the "V-Ray" plugin configuration and also tick the checkboxes for V-Ray and UsdPreview materials. This should export both materials for each assignment and each will target the respective renderer. I think one limitations is that V-Ray will not write texture connections to UsdPreview in this case, but it's on our list to improve this.

What's your experience and impressions of the Unity workflow so far?

[Measter]

After selecting the V-Ray configuration the options for materials are deselected and greyed out. This is USDMaya .20 and the latest VRAY 5 nightly (Feb 1.



Using PiXYZ to ingest the top level USD flattened all the USD data (as expected) and correctly respected opinions that were muted, so that was awesome. We only had one model with textures in that first test, but it did successfully pull it into the project, but did not assign it. All properties assigned in USDPreviewSurface were correctly translated, and we could choose the shader it mapped to. HDRP lit successfully mapped the USDPreviewSurface values. Model placements and scale overrides from opinions were also respected and we were able to align the factory layout to a point cloud we had laser scanned very easily.

We lost all the USD functionality of course because it's poorly supported, but it would be interesting to see what can be maintained using the experimental USD package. However I talked to some of the Unity folks at Siggraph and that package is not being actively developed, however they promised me that they're working on a new implementation. I'm doubtful however based on how some of their presenters tactfully dodged the topic.

[antonio_cruz]

I finally got it to work. kind of. Seems I wont be able to utilize usd if I plan on using the chaos cloud to render.