I decided to participate on this H20 Tech Art challenge with this tool called "USD Attribute Mapper", I hope you like this tool and find it useful as the other ones
The idea behind the tool:
One of the most concurrent places to work in Houdini is SOPs, due to this fact, it means that we can have access to a huge set of tools to do an infinite kind of operations to attributes. In SOPs we have multiple ways to create and modify an attribute, the modifications can be done in multiple ways using built-in tools or external libraries like MOPs.
On my short working experience with Solaris, I found that level of accessibility is missing right now due to the nature of USD, where we don't have one node to create an attribute and we need to work with VEX if we want to create an attribute or do complex modifications (i.e. modify an attribute based on the prim position, etc).
With that in mind, I decided to create a tool that can allow to modify an existing USD attribute from a primitives selection or even create an attribute with a more familiar UI to the one that we find in SOPs, this should be compatible and useful for a lot of workflows and type of artists (FX, motion, layout, etc).
Final Release:
Beta Demo:
You will find the current HDA version and an reference hip file attached below with multiple example setups.
Tool Concept:
The USD Attribute Mapper works mainly in two steps:
1 - Create a SOP attribute inside to be used for remapping.
2 - Select the operation type to be used on the mapping/modification of the USD attribute.
Examples:
As the image specifies, the created SOP attribute can be used to modify the lights properties (height, width, intensity, etc) and it can be used to slowly enable all the lights on the scene or change their color, etc.
Using the same example, with MOPs we can use the shape falloff nodes to control the USD attributes with a tridimensional shape mask.
In the video below you can see the lights example and one example modifying the "size" attribute from a cube prim:
*In the video in the end I modified the PSR of the points just to show that is still possible to do inside of the node like on the SOP Modify lop node.
Some extra notes:
- There is some basic combination operators available like: Add, Subtract, Multiply and Divide.
- Multiple mappings can be done at the same time but always with the same pattern selection of primitives.
- The USD attribute can be imported in SOPs if it is needed, this might be useful in some cases (depending the type of the attribute this might not work, USD can store multiple types of attributes and in multiple ways, not all of then will be compatible with this workflow).
Roadmap:
----------
I hope you like it and find it useful for your everyday workflow.
Cheers!
but the important thing is that I hope that this tool can be useful for a lot of users to doing more things in Solaris