Severe bug with USD Animation

[doppelgaenger_digital]

I am in the middle of a production and we wondered, why my simulation timings don't match the Maya timeline anymore. I have a sequence of approx. 1500 frames. The animation should start at ~778, but when I import the scene with USD in Maya, the Animation starts at ~748. Which is exactly the difference I get when setting my timeline settings to 23,97/24fps.

So I assume that no matter what FPS is set in Maya, Bifrost USD (and Maya USD? but not tried) completely ignores those settings and works with internal framerates. 

This is a complete showstopper. We verified at the client site also. It's the same on their machines.

Maya 2023.2, Bifrost 2.5.1.0, USD 0.16

EDIT: I should add, that the same USD File gets read in correctly in Houdini.

[sepu6]

Not sure if this will solve the issue, but did you try using the latest USD 0.19? 

[doppelgaenger_digital]

Hi Sepu!

I tested it now with USD 0.19

The same bug is happening, but only when USD is loaded with Bifrost. When I open a USD Stage from Maya the Animation timing is correct.

I wonder how many people use USD in production in Maya...seems to be very few or only people dealing with ~24fps.

[Christoph_Schaedl]

Most effective would be to file the bugs on the official Maya_USD bug tracker.
https://github.com/Autodesk/maya-usd/issues

[doppelgaenger_digital]

You're right, oglu. Don't know if it's a USD Bug though. The Maya USD is loading fine.

[sepu6]

out of curiosity, is the proxy sharable or not? and if it is did you try without it? 

Also what you could try is to save the assets as .usda open it up in a text editor and see the metadata, and change the FPS if you have to. 

[doppelgaenger_digital]

okay, this is weird. Switching to shareable USD is changing the animation to the correct timing. 

Any comments from the devs? It's pretty quiet here...super annoying. 

[guillaume.laforge]

Hi @Anonymous_digital,

Glad to here it is working in shareable mode. This is the first time I’m hearing about such discrepancy in regard to animation when shareable is turned off. Would you mind sharing a simplified version of your usd file reproing the issue?

For info, when shareable is turned on, the stage you are seeing in the outliner/viewport is the one coming from Bifrost USD. When shareable is off, Maya USD creates a new stage and add the root layer of the Bifrost USD stage as a sublayer. But in both cases, such stage is connected to the Maya time, so if you can provide a file to debug this issue it would be great.

Thanks

[guillaume.laforge]

Thanks to@doppelgaenger_digital who privately sent me the USD file. I could repro!
I can confirm that the workaround is to check "Shareable" in the Attribute Editor (with the mayaUsdProxyShape selected).
I logged the issue internally to investigate the weird time offset when "Sharable" is turned off.

[doppelgaenger_digital]

Hope you find a fix soon and thanks for further investigation, even if it's (maybe) not Bifrosts fault. 

Thanks for your support! (also over on the discord, which is great!)