“This plugin offers the deepest-yet integration of USD editing into a third-party DCC, and provides well-considered layout and animation workflows that are beyond the scope of Pixar’s Maya plugins. “Pixar is very excited by the release of Animal Logic’s USDMaya plugin”, said Sebastian Grassia, Lead Engineer for the USD project. Additionally, heavyweight scene elements such as sets and crowds can be represented in OpenGL in the Maya viewport, and manipulated either with USD or Maya tools and UI components.ĪL_USDMaya complements Pixar’s USD Maya plugin, and both can operate side by side. This affords a dynamic user experience that allows artists to swap in and out different representations of objects in their scene, including Rigs for geometry caches and different levels of detail. The plugin maintains a “live” connection between the USD and Maya scene, and can respond to various events, keeping the Maya and USD scenes in sync. Animal Logic uses AL_USDMaya to allow native Maya entities such as complex Maya Rigs loaded as references, and other assets not easily represented in USD, to be embedded in USD scenes and imported into Maya in their native form. The goal of the plugin is to leverage the strengths of both Maya and USD and use each one to represent the data that it is most suited to. During this time, Animal Logic was developing its own common scene description format based on technology from its in-house Renderer, Glimpse and since then, the AL_USDMaya plugin has been in development within Animal Logic’s Research & Development (R&D) team. As Maya is used extensively in the Animal Logic pipeline, it was important to have a sophisticated integration of USD into Maya. When Pixar confirmed early last year that it would open source USD, Animal Logic became an early adopter of the technology and decided to use it as the backbone of its new Animation Pipeline. USD supports the interchange of 3D graphics data through various Digital Content Creation (DCC) tools, providing an effective and scalable solution for the complex workflows of CG film and game industry studios. The plugin enables powerful and efficient authoring and editing of 3D graphics data using Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD) in Autodesk Maya.ĪL_USDMaya builds upon Pixar’s USD technology, which was released as open source in 2016 (see for more details). Animal Logic today announced the open source release of its USDMaya plugin (known as “AL_USDMaya”).
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