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Based on what I've seen here, seems like something like Unity would be a perfect choice.

by MattRix 10y ago

erichocean 10y ago
Eh, not really: Unity assets are game-oriented, not film-oriented, so film assets require a lot of (re-)work to get them into a format that Unity can use (or vice versa: build in Unity and then re-build later for use in your film pipeline). What's working better for me is Pixar's Hydra[0] renderer displaying Universal Scene Description (USD) scenes.[1] Hydra displays unaltered film assets at interactive frame rates easily, supports subdivision surfaces and Alembic geometry natively, and with USD it's trivial to incorporate caches, turn assets on and off at runtime, reuse models from scene to scene, etc. IMO USD is practically ideal for previz. Absolutely loving it so far, and in the process of building a much larger pipeline around it. The downside of USD, I guess, is it's mostly Linux-only today, though Mac OS X and Windows ports are in progress and seem likely to be ready in the next 3-6 months. We're a Linux-only shop so it hasn't affected us. The main thing we wish Hydra did out-of-the-box is interact with the HTC Vive. We're looking into how to get VR rendering with Hydra and nVidia's dual-GPU VR extension. It may be necessary to do this on Windows, unfortunately. [0] http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2015/presentation/S5327-Jeremy-Cowles.pdf http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2015/presentation/S5327... [1] http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html
- mncharity 10y ago
  > The main thing we wish Hydra did out-of-the-box is interact with the HTC Vive. We're looking into how to get VR rendering with Hydra and nVidia's dual-GPU VR extension. It may be necessary to do this on Windows, unfortunately. If you can create a simple fullscreen window with a stereo pair (no lens correction needed), then you can drive a Vive on linux.[0] It's not something you'd want to upstream to Hydra, but it makes for a surprisingly nice quick-and-dirty placeholder. [0] https://github.com/mncharity/node-webvr-alt-stack https://github.com/mncharity/node-webvr-alt-stack (disclaimer:author) And FWIW, http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Vrui/ http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Vrui/ is said to also have some support for Vive on linux.

Based on what I've seen here, seems like something like Unity would be a perfect choice.

by MattRix 10y ago

Based on what I've seen here, seems like something like Unity would be a perfect choice.

Eh, not really: Unity assets are game-oriented, not film-oriented, so film assets require a lot of (re-)work to get them into a format that Unity can use (or vice versa: build in Unity and then re-build later for use in your film pipeline). What's working better for me is Pixar's Hydra[0] renderer displaying Universal Scene Description (USD) scenes.[1] Hydra displays unaltered film assets at interactive frame rates easily, supports subdivision surfaces and Alembic geometry natively, and with USD it's trivial to incorporate caches, turn assets on and off at runtime, reuse models from scene to scene, etc. IMO USD is practically ideal for previz. Absolutely loving it so far, and in the process of building a much larger pipeline around it. The downside of USD, I guess, is it's mostly Linux-only today, though Mac OS X and Windows ports are in progress and seem likely to be ready in the next 3-6 months. We're a Linux-only shop so it hasn't affected us. The main thing we wish Hydra did out-of-the-box is interact with the HTC Vive. We're looking into how to get VR rendering with Hydra and nVidia's dual-GPU VR extension. It may be necessary to do this on Windows, unfortunately. [0] http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2015/presentation/S5327-Jeremy-Cowles.pdf http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2015/presentation/S5327... [1] http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html

mncharity 10y ago
> The main thing we wish Hydra did out-of-the-box is interact with the HTC Vive. We're looking into how to get VR rendering with Hydra and nVidia's dual-GPU VR extension. It may be necessary to do this on Windows, unfortunately. If you can create a simple fullscreen window with a stereo pair (no lens correction needed), then you can drive a Vive on linux.[0] It's not something you'd want to upstream to Hydra, but it makes for a surprisingly nice quick-and-dirty placeholder. [0] https://github.com/mncharity/node-webvr-alt-stack https://github.com/mncharity/node-webvr-alt-stack (disclaimer:author) And FWIW, http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Vrui/ http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Vrui/ is said to also have some support for Vive on linux.