USD Export from Maya 2023 to UE5

hello elf here and in today's video i'm going to walk you through how we take an asset from maya 2023 into unreal engine 5 using usd usd was the brainchild of pixar and is open source it's used amongst many creators primarily for transferring or transporting data sets between different software as it says here on the pixar site it can contain data such as geometry shaders lighting and physics and also boasts a number of other really nice features too we have seen a big shift towards usd over the last couple of years and it started to trickle into lots of different applications so it's obvious that a lot of people feel quite positively about its feature set like we do here at anela so let's get to it i'm going to [Music] open up my scene i've got my scene open here and the first thing we want to do is just make sure that we have the plugins loaded correctly so best way to do that is to go to your plugin manager and just type in usd and checked just to make sure that you've got maya usd plug-in loaded um i know that if you are using omniverse um there are some conflicts that happen between omniverse and that usd plug-in so just something to bear in mind when you're playing around so this asset is a cabin it's it's very unfinished as just the the start of the shell um but we have it in a group we have a group and then we have the different elements making up that group down here so we have two ways of doing this really we could send it across and do all the shading over an unreal engine which is generally the way we we tend to work however sometimes it's nice to be able to have the option to to render things or in in arnold and actually see it in a path tracer and some some of you might be wanting to to to do some of your shading work over here and then actually send it across into unreal engine so that's sort of the the pipeline that i'm going to show you now or the process so i'll just look at this front cladding and i'm going to go up to the hypershade window and open that one up and in the hypershade i'm going to create a usd preview surface so with your usd plugin you will see that you now have the option to create one of these usd preview surfaces now this is a pbr based surface and it is called a preview surface so what we have here is all our standard channels that we would have in any pbr shader so we've got diffuse we've got emissive occlusion opacity we have metallic and roughness and we have normal as well so this the way that this works is that we can actually get it across into unreal engine um with anything still plugged in so if we wanted to do a bit shader work in here that's absolutely fine so i've already downloaded a few textures that i'm going to bring in and i just need to find those okay so i've got a normal map i've got a roughness and i've got a an albedo what i'm going to do is just take the place 2d texture i'm holding control and just dragging into the white dot up here and then with my roughness i'm going from the out alpha let me just spread these out a bit more okay so roughness out alpha into the roughness and making sure alpha is luminance is checked on the albedo will go into the diffuse color and the normal will go straight in to the normal slot here and then i'm going to apply this to my cladding and i will call it material m for material usd clad and if i actually look at this now in my viewport you'll see that you've got um an opengl representation of of your texture here so obviously i have this already uv mapped okay so i've plugged in these textures another thing that we do have up here is we can in the plug-in manager we do have this thing called hydra so if you search m2h and then check on m2h in here that will enable hydra in your renderer options here as well so we have a viewport 2.0 you'll notice if i switch it to arnold try to render this you're just going to see this default pink color which obviously means that that it has no arnold shader applied but if we go to the arnold hydra and have a look at that you'll notice that you're you're starting to see a representation of your scene as it would be with arnold and i haven't plugged in any arnold shaders this is just um doing that automatically for us so um that's really cool um and i just wanted to show that that was there it's not the point of this of this demo though so what we're going to do now is select the cabin and we will export this so export selection and then in the file type menu we have usd export down here we also have arnold usd um and yes so if we knew that we were sort of staying in the arnold ecosystem we could probably check this arnold usd on and then and then use that but i'm just going to leave the the default usd export and then we have a plug-in configuration down here as well which we can check on to arnold which i will do and then dot usd file format i'm going to change to ascii and then the parent scope i'm just going to make sure that i've got a relevant name in here such as cabin subdivision method well i'm not needing to subdivide my mesh it's all um just poly polygonal so i'm checking this onto polygonal mesh and then i think all the rest are default but i'm just going to make sure the usd preview surface is checked on and then i will give this a name so let's give this a version seven because that's how many versions i have gone through to make sure that this is going to be okay for you guys to to do and to follow along with so i've exported that out and i'm going to launch unreal engine now which is over here so i i have a level and we're going to need to do something similar than to what we did in maya where we will enable usd in the plugins so edit plugins and then usd and then just make sure that your usd importer is checked on and then if you are working sort of in teams or in groups then you can also enable the multi-user sync for for usd importer plug-in as well so i've just enabled those two you will need to restart your application just to confirm those changes and then when when you do that what you should be able to access now is at the top we've got window down to virtual production and you should have access to this usd stage now your usd stage is essentially as the name sounds it's a stage or a set or an environment or a world that is going to hold any other usd information okay so you can sort of treat it as being the container for all of the separate usd parts that you might have so i'm going to file new and that will give me my stage and then actually i'm just going to open my my cabin but you can also import it or reference it so i'm going to open and then find the version of my usd and have a look at that now and you can see already that we've got our textures coming straight in and applied to our object over here you'll notice in the outliner that we have a usd stage actor and then underneath we've got the cabin group and that's all we can see in the outliner but then if you look in the details panel the group is broken down into the the the different elements here and as you click through you'll notice that your materials you can you can change down here in the details part also in the stage itself you can access all of the usd information for that for that file so i can drop cabin group down i can see all the different parts i can see all the all the details and information about the mesh or the shading we've got under looks we've got the the shading information we've got the textures that are being used and then also we've got these arnold specific options down the bottom here as well so that's that's what you get with usd you get all of that information and carried around so that you can use it as you wish i will just point out that when i originally tried this in my static mesh i was having trouble with my uv channels and so it it i had one uv channel it was uv 0 and it was showing nothing in here so actually when i applied a material that it wasn't right and it it was like there were there were no uvs there and i don't know if this was a bug or not but for me the way that i fixed it was by going into maya and going to my uv editor and in my uvs i had to create a new i copied my uvs to a new set and then that seemed to work for me next time i took it over to unreal it recognized the the uv channel i'm not sure if this is a bug or not but um it doesn't doesn't seem to be happening anymore so i just wanted to point that out and and that might that might catch one or two of you out so yeah that's how to take an asset from maya into unreal engine using usd hope that's been helpful for you guys if you want to stay updated with the channel please hit the subscribe button and have a lovely day cheers

Channel: Anella Visuals

Views: 11,380

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Id: gMlw6YA9pwU

Length: 12min 46sec (766 seconds)

Published: Sun May 22 2022