This repository contains a set of components and tools to use the Arnold renderer with Pixar's Universal Scene Description. Notably, the following components are included:
- Hydra render delegate
- Arnold procedural for USD
- Schemas to describe an Arnold scene in USD
Contributions are welcome! Please make sure to read the contribution guidelines.
Please follow the building instructions. To use the components, provided you installed in <arnold-usd_dir>
, set the following environment variables:
- Add
<arnold-usd_dir>/procedural
toARNOLD_PLUGIN_PATH
for the Arnoldusd
procedural. - Add
<arnold-usd_dir>/lib/python
toPYTHONPATH
for the Python schema bindings. - Add
<arnold-usd_dir>/plugin
toPXR_PLUGINPATH_NAME
for the Hydra render delegate and the Node Registry plugin. - Add
<arnold-usd_dir>/lib/usd
toPXR_PLUGINPATH_NAME
for the USD schemas. - Add
<arnold-usd_dir>/lib
toLD_LIBRARY_PATH
on Linux,PATH
on Windows andDYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
on Mac.
The render delegate currently supports the following features:
- RPrim Support
- Mesh
- All primvars are supported, st/uv is accessible through the built-in uv attribute on the mesh
- Support for the displayColor primvar
- Subdivision settings
- Volume
- Points
- Mesh
- SPrim Support
- Materials
- Arnold shaders are supported, the
info:id
attribute is used to determine the shader type - UsdPreviewSurface is translated to Arnold shaders
- Arnold shaders are supported, the
- Lights
- Distant Light
- Sphere Light
- Disk Light
- Rect Light
- Cylinder Light
- Dome Light
- Materials
- BPrim Support
- Render Buffer
- OpenVDB Asset
- Point Instancer, including nesting of Point Instancers
- Selection in USD View and other applications using the
primId
AOV - Displaying the Color, Depth and PrimID AOVs
- Motion Blur
- Deformation
- Transformation
- Render Settings via the Render Delegate
- Sampling parameters
- Threading parameters
- Ignore parameters
- Profiling and logging parameters
- Switching between CPU and GPU mode seamlessly
- Default values are configurable through environment variables for most of these parameters
Limitations
- Crash on linux at startup with usdview : Currently, the arnold library needs to be ld-preloaded to avoid the crash, e.g.
LD_PRELOAD=/path_to_arnold/bin/libai.so usdview scene.usda
- No motion blur support for the Point Instancer attributes
- Can’t preview arbitrary primvar AOVs
- No basisCurves
- No field3d volume grids
- Not all the parameters are accessible through the render settings
- Texture Cache size
- Texture generation parameters (automip, autotile)
- No normal maps on the UsdPreviewSurface
- Only converging renders are supported (ie. it’s not possible to block the viewport until the render finishes)
- No HdExtComputation and UsdSkel computation via the render delegate
- No of physical camera parameters
- No coordsys support
The Node Registry plugin supports the current features:
- Registering Sdr nodes for every built-in shader and custom shader
- Setting up the asset URI either to
<built-in>
or to the path of the shader library providing the shader. - Creating all parameters.
- Setting up the asset URI either to
Limitations
- No nodes registered for
- Shapes
- Lights
- Filters
- Drivers
- No node is registered for the options node
- Metadata is not converted for any node
The procedural supports the following features:
- USD shapes
- UsdGeomMesh
- UsdGeomCurves
- UsdGeomPoints
- UsdGeomCube
- UsdGeomSphere
- UsdGeomCone
- UsdGeomCylinder
- primvars are translated as user data
- USD Lights
- UsdLuxDistantLight
- UsdLuxDomeLight
- UsdLuxDiskLight
- UsdLuxSphereLight
- UsdLuxRectLight
- UsdLuxGeometryLight
- Support for textured lights (dome and rectangle)
- USD native shaders
- UsdPreviewSurface
- UsdPrimVar*
- UsdUVTexture
- Arnold shaders supported as UsdShade nodes (where info:id gives the shader type)
- Support for any additional Arnold parameter in USD nodes (e.g. attribute
arnold:subdiv_iterations
in a UsdGeomMesh) - Support for any Arnold node type (e.g. USD type ArnoldSetParameter gets rendered as arnold
set_parameter
node) - Support for multi-threaded parsing of a USD file
Limitations Currently unsupported:
- Nurbs
- Point Instancer
- Cameras
- Luma Pictures' usd-arnold
- RodeoFX's OpenWalter
- Ben Asher
- Sebastien Blaineau-Ortega
- Chad Dombrova
- Guillaume Laforge
- Julian Hodgson
- Thiago Ize
- Pal Mezei
- Paul Molodowitch
- Nathan Rusch
- Frederic Servant