A Detailed Look at USD Layering Systems in Autodesk Maya for VFX Artists

[Music] foreign as you can see we are back in Maya and this time I want to talk about USD layers in my previous tutorial you noticed that I just briefly touched upon that area I was mainly focusing on the unlock device and a little bit about UST stages but today we will be focusing on how you can actually make a big use of layering within USD we have our same chappy acid here as before and if you haven't done so check out my previous tutorial on how to use look DivX and USD and Maya so we've got CPE final as my Geo model here and the first step what we want to do is let's just create a stage which is just responsible for a modeler or the modeling Department let's create a new stage with a new layer double click Anonymous layer and just name it to be chappy underscore model this will create the USD file and we can also name the stage 2 model all we have to do now copy the Geo into the model stage so all we're going to do is right click duplicate on under model shape and now you can see that it lives under the stage under model shape let's just create a new scope for this and just name this Geo so it's all nice and tidy and this goes in here and now it's all part of the same hierarchy and now all we got to do now is save it will say hey I want to save it to that file and do yes so now we have our model USD file let's also create let's say a camera USD file where which is maybe driven by layout or mesh move or whatever so I'll just create a camera from View and let's just place it a little bit more interesting maybe also change the lens to focal length to 85 I think that works and now we do have a camera in place let's just lock this placement and I can now right click duplicate this USD data and we only have the model shape but now let's create a new one create a new stage with new layer we name this one chappy underscore camera now that is here you can name this to camera as well just a stage name and we can duplicate the main camera to the camera shape and now it lives underneath here same as before let's create a scope name this cam and drag that in here and now we have that as well so let's hit save let's do lights as well so for this to work with USD right now the Maya lights are not supported but I'm pretty sure in a future video this will work just fine now let's create a light Arnold light let's do area light and let's let me just do maybe a top-down lighting now we have the light switch here at the top and now we do the same thing as before we create a new stage with new layer and this time we call this chappy lighting that is saved let's call this lighting and now we right click the light duplicate under lighting shape stage and then we do the same as before or let's create a scope name this LGT full lighting drop that in here potentially rename this to top light and then hit save so now we created three different stages right ideally we want to kind of combine them so we just have a simple chappy layer which we need to work off let's create a stage with a new layer and in this case let's just name it chappie which is our main USD file save that and now it's chap USD let's name the stage as well to name it chappie if you haven't noticed we have a right-click option here to load sub layers that's what we want to do we want to pick all the sub layers we just created load them in here and make sure you use relative paths so you can always easily share that USD file and then you have all these sub layers created let's hit save and now you can see that under our chappie share we have the cam Geo light all of them are part of this main chap USD file I could technically now delete the other stages because they are living within that USD file just a thing to note a little bit different on how you want to work imagine you work in different dccs or you're working with different people you can potentially just give one person the lighting USD file and then they can only work on the lighting the other person can just work on the model so it's a different scene and you as the render person you can load the chappy asset and you will get all these updates in your scene on the fly now imagine the the model stage is changed so I'm imagine we want to do some changes to the model and I want to make sure I'm looking at the model stage that is active now and let's say I want to Let's hide this piece here and if I save this and I hide my model stage so we don't have anything and I reopen the Chaffee stage you can see that it's also missing now in my main render file and that is the beauty of this and the same applies to lights if I now want to change the lighting let's say I want to do a side light instead I can either now work in the lighting stage as I adjusted in the models Edge switch to lighting change it and then um let me just reopen this editor because sometimes it's not updating the names so now we have our lighting I could do I could work in here or as I said before I can also work in the main chappie one way we see all the things and then it's just important to make sure that you're working you you enable this blue icon here next to the name so it knows where to make the changes to so now if I want to make a side light of this here I just move it to the side do it save it like place it here and then I hit save and now this will save to the lighting USD file and if I now bring open up the lighting value you can see that the light is also moved on this end so that's really cool and now let's head over to Houdini and I'll show you how that works there and now looking in Houdini I just created a sub layer node under this stage pointing into my chappy USD file and we get exactly the same thing missing head played light is on the right imagine now I head back to Maya and I want to add maybe the shaders to it all we have to do now is um create them and save them to the stage I did have them already prepared so I will just load them in here quick and now you can see I have the chappie material loaded I can visualize that obviously in Luke Dev X again as easy as before we can just go to our main Shader select our Geo right click it assign material to selection and now that is being assigned to chappy and if I save now you can see one mistake I did I saved it to the USD file to the lighting file so maybe that will cause some problems but if I head back to Houdini now and I reload my file you will notice that we should get the material files loaded as well you can see chappies is loaded up in here and it's also assigned to my Geo and if I render now and then we can see our chappie is lit from the side with the textures applied that's the beauty of it so you can easily work between different dccs and make adjustments change USD files I can now change the model again let's say in Maya let's just actually do the unhide and unhide it and then we are in this let's save it and then reload the sub layer and voila the head piece is back so it's super flexible super quick to work with and I hope you enjoyed this little update let me know what you think in the comments below I always read what you post thanks again and I will see you in the next one mm-hmm [Music]

Channel: Arvid Schneider

Views: 16,155

Keywords: USD layering, Autodesk Maya, VFX workflow, 3D projects, efficiency, collaboration, complex scenes, asset management, user-friendly interface, visual effects, high-quality, tutorial, must-watch, game-changing, next-level, streamlined, powerful feature, real-world examples, seamless, mastery, stunning results, Arvid Schneider, VFX artist, industry expert, 3D software, Maya tutorial, professional insights, VFX techniques, CGI, computer graphics

Id: -m5McRmyGC8

Length: 8min 15sec (495 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2023