Time

9am Pacific

Agenda

Zoom

https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/94179328045

Notes

Namespace Editing

First question : what happens when a hiearchy is modified?
Santa Monica studio (@Jeremiah Zanin ) is using Maya a lot. How to handle when references are broken?

@Thomas Trently  suggested to use the resolver. The namespace eidting would be the way of managing (With the resolver we could use GUID, databases, etc).

@Varun Talwar explained that there are some discussions to clean the code up to relocate in SdF.

At Ubisoft (@Charles Flèche ), they are adding ID in metadata. All USDs are transient. There is Database of Ids per asset. One asset is 1 id in the Db.

@Thomas Trently in custom engines, when moving data around, we need the source and all the linked data to follow around (eg : redirector in Unreal Engine). The source of truth is the engine asset. So the DCCs need to access this engine. Rename, move should be handled.

How do you handle variants??

At Ubisoft, the path to an asset is not clear : the asset is in the data model : the actual 3D Scene is somewhere else. Referencing by path is not possible.
A character is an entity.

@Former user (Deleted) is wondering what GUID solve vs what asset path solve?

@Thomas Trently is also wondering is there is there an higher solution for games?

@Former user (Deleted) if you have  a long term IP, you should be able to grab all the data.
GUID requieres tooling whereas pathing does not.

@Blazej Floch explained that there a cultural way of doing it.

@Thomas Trently explains that having a backlog of assets in USD is a good selling point. Like that, new iterations of games can have assets already.

@Former user (Deleted) added that having a backcatalog is great for references, for marketing.

@Thomas Trently  or to have a lot of generic assets (See Pixar's Backlot https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3450623.3464654)

How can we standardize this? WOuld it belong to the cookbook?

In Unreal, (@Matt Johnson ) there is nothing specific to handle all of this.

In Unity, there are some investigations. There is a big desire with this. They are waiting for the standard.

@Levi Biasco When moving things around, it is where GUID are important. A semantic connection like GUIDs that can reliably point to a scene object even if it was moved in its original file is more important than hard path connections if renaming/reparenting is a frequent operation. 
There are 2 graphs:

• a scene graph

• a conceptual graph with semantics links

There is a mental model to break : how to represent that for the team?

Thomas is also asking how to use USD lights in game engine.

Next meeting topics

• Semantic connections

• Usage of USDLight in video game

Attendance