Auodesk USD vs Arnold USD

[Anonymous]

I am curious to know why there are two separate usd exporters, one from mtoa and another from autodfesk maya, Can't this be integrated as one thing ?? I see quite a lot of differences how both USD write out data, for example

1. arnold usd only add type of prim if its mesh, if its a xform it just don't have that info
2. Animation turned on during export generate separate USD files per frame.

If my understanding is correct both your plugins are not yet in a production ready state. do you have any ETA ??

[sebastien.blaineau.ortegaHRM3U]

Hi,

yes this can be confusing indeed, but they are both doing quite different things.

- The Arnold-USD menu exports the scene as an arnold standalone file, exactly as when you export the scene to .ass, it just uses a different file format. It will save everything needed to render a given frame : shaders, render options, arnold nodes and parameters, etc...This feature exists in all the DCCs we support in an identical way (houdini, c4d, 3dsMax, Katana). The issue you mention in 1) has already been addressed in the arnold-usd github repository and will be fixed in a future release. The second issue isn't addressed yet, we export one file per frame as we do for .ass files.

- The Maya USD menu exports the maya scene to USD, including the whole xform hierarchy and a whole sequence, but as of now it won't export the arnold data yet. We're planning to extend the maya USD export so that the arnold data is exported as well. When this will be done, the maya usd export should have everything you need, and the arnold usd export might not be needed anymore.

We cannot communicate any ETA, but you can look at both the arnold-usd and the maya-usd to keep track of the progress on both sides.