Official USD for Unity Updates

That worked thanks.

 

Is it possible to Import a USDZ file? e.g, the guitar from here https://developer.apple.com/arkit/gallery/models/stratocaster/stratocaster.usdz

I can unzip the file and load the usdc, but the textures aren't loaded in that case.

 

@jeremyco
It doesn't seem to be available for iOS ? This is the error I get when I try to build for iOS device.

Assets/Samples/USD/1.0.0-preview.4/HelloUsd/HelloUsdExample.cs(16,7): error CS0246: The type or namespace name 'USD' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

 

Hey @marief_unity Thank you so much...That worked really well...

 

The USDZ exporter has the same issue as Khronos' GLB exporter: it doesn't really fit into Unity's philosophy of "image assets" being indepent of source files and just doesn't export textures if they are PSD files, or TGA, or runtime Render Textures... That is a huge blocker for people just wanting to export something. It would be cool if there would at least be export options for that - e.g. "bake what you can and just gimme a model that looks close to what I see in Unity".

 

And a bug report: scaling objects before export doesn't influence the exported size.

 

Hm... Maybe I'm doing something wrong when following the workaround instructions. Have you tried exporting the animated model that I've shared to USDZ and then run it on iOS? Does the animation work?

 

*edit* Actually it may not be too bad of a problem, was able to bypass the check for isReadable but not sure if it will limit anything.

is there any plan to fix the "Mesh not readable:" warning when exporting USD, or any current method to work around that issue?

This is kind of a severe but not-so apparent limitation, especially for large teams & projects.

We would like to have art pipeline benefits using formats like USD, but cannot sacrifice memory on-device with having the meshes marked as read-write

(Meshes marked read write are double the memory cost).

Also toggling the mesh import setting temporarily when exporting will also waste time with additional asset re-imports once toggling the setting back to off, so that isn't ideal either. (hundreds of meshes might be part of a selection for export)

 

Any info on this (the question cited above)? I can't seem to get the animation working on iOS, whatever hierarchy I try. I tried importing other animated USDZs that actually work and noticed that they have two important prims: Skeleton and SkelRoot (parent of Skeleton and Mesh prims). Whereas my USDZ didn't have SkelRoot. So, I added an additional parent to the whole animated game object in Unity and now I have SkelRoot. But it still doesn't animate on iOS :/ What's interesting is that bones of the rigs in the other USDZs have usd prims attached to all of them, whereas the one exported from Unity doesn't have that. Not sure if that could be a problem and no idea how to fix/change that on my side. So, those are my recent findings – maybe they'll help you in any way to make it work on iOS (or if it already does on your end, it would be great to get the instructions how to make it work, as the ones on github aren't enough :/ ).

 

What Digital Content Creation (DCC) tool are you using to create your animation?

Some people have had success making the animation in Maya/Maya LT and then converting the FBX to USD...

Also, Houdini Indie supports USD exports if you compile the SideFX USD plugin for it...

 

The animation is being made in Maya. Have you seen people successfully converting FBX to USDZ through Unity? If not, do you have any links I could look into?

 

@jeremyco if you're working towards a release, would be great if you take a look at the issues with IL2CPP as more and more of Unity moves towards that, and some of the functionality breaks with IL2CPP. See https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/usd-unity-sdk/issues/100

 

At some point yes, but first it would be for a Desktop project that's on IL2CPP for various reasons.
With some tinkering I even got the "competition" (Khronos Group's GLTF package) working in WebGL with IL2CPP.
(Note that I'm mostly interested in the USD/USDZ export options)

Just out of curiosity - why does it have a major performance hit?

 

Thank you for the update! Hoping for the best

 

@jeremyco Hi, I'm currently developing an app for IOS that load from a back-office a non rigged and non animated 3d objects(fbx file format) and display them in augmented reality mode, now my client wants to make the app capable of loading usdz file at run-time, is unity dev team working on developing an API(compatible IOS) that will make it possible for us to load usdz files at run time? if there is a work development on this API, can we know the status? thanks in advance

 

and ios

 

Any news on the IOS support? please

 

@marief_unity Would be great if you could, like main Unity releases, have a "Known Issues" section.
Top of that list, for me at least: "Export is not working when IL2CPP is used as Scripting Backend. Needs to use Mono for now."

 

Is it possible to just use usd to import the animation and then apply that to a skinned mesh (the same model just imported as a fbx) in unity?

 

I was just looking into why runtime texture export fails and found that basically there is none implemented! ShaderExporterBase has an #ifdef UNITY_EDITOR around the relevant parts and then just throws an exception if someone tries that at runtime with a totally wrong comment on it "too many things can go wrong (can't encode compressed textures, etc)".

Note that this is incorrect, as numerous exporters (FBX, GLTF etc) show and I implemented myself in the past - you can always blit a compressed texture into an uncompressed one, and get that out as proper file. Even texture arrays can be unpacked.

Also, there's a bug - the code there only works for textures on disk, not textures that only live in memory. It fails with exceptions when trying to export textures that aren't actual files on disk (e.g. texture assets that are subassets, textures created in memory, ...).

And third, do you allow pull requests on the USDZ repo?

 

After importing usd, the shader connected to the material doesn't seem to be loaded.
Our material hiearachy is Material / UsdPreviewSurface / UsdUVTexture / UsdPrimvarReader_float2.

And do you have any plans to support Curve?

 

@jeremyco I opened an issue here https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/usd-unity-sdk/issues/122

 

@jeremyco i alread tried import mode to "preview surface" and reimport and refresh. but don't access shader scheme.

and i want to see curve in unity. we use basisCurves. so i hope, basisCurve in usdfile see in unity.

 

Hi,

Is there a reason why I can't import a usdz file? If this package can export a usdz file, it should be able to import it right?

Bye,

Jean

 

Hi,

quick feedback: if you try to refresh a usd prefab form the asset editor window directly, you get errors:

Destroying assets is not permitted to avoid data loss.
If you really want to remove an asset use DestroyImmediate (theObject, true);
UnityEngine.ObjectestroyImmediate(Object)
Unity.Formats.USD.SceneImporter:RemoveComponent(GameObject) (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.formats.usd@1.0.1-preview.1/Runtime/Scripts/IO/Scene/SceneImporter.cs:293)
Unity.Formats.USD.<BuildScene>d__9:MoveNext() (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.formats.usd@1.0.1-preview.1/Runtime/Scripts/IO/Scene/SceneImporter.cs:331)
Unity.Formats.USD.SceneImporter:BuildScene(Scene, GameObject, SceneImportOptions, PrimMap, Boolean) (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.formats.usd@1.0.1-preview.1/Runtime/Scripts/IO/Scene/SceneImporter.cs:282)
Unity.Formats.USD.SceneImporter:ImportUsd(GameObject, Scene, PrimMap, Boolean, SceneImportOptions) (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.formats.usd@1.0.1-preview.1/Runtime/Scripts/IO/Scene/SceneImporter.cs:259)
Unity.Formats.USD.SceneImporter:ImportUsd(GameObject, Scene, PrimMap, SceneImportOptions) (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.formats.usd@1.0.1-preview.1/Runtime/Scripts/IO/Scene/SceneImporter.cs:243)
Unity.Formats.USD.UsdAsset:Reload(Boolean) (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.formats.usd@1.0.1-preview.1/Runtime/Scripts/Behaviors/UsdAsset.cs:548)
Unity.Formats.USD.UsdAssetEditor:ReloadFromUsd(UsdAsset, Boolean) (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.formats.usd@1.0.1-preview.1/Editor/Scripts/Behaviors/UsdAssetEditor.cs:268)
Unity.Formats.USD.UsdAssetEditor:OnInspectorGUI() (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.formats.usd@1.0.1-preview.1/Editor/Scripts/Behaviors/UsdAssetEditor.cs:114)
UnityEngine.GUIUtilityrocessEvent(Int32, IntPtr)

it seems you must open the prefab for it to work. If that's the case, maybe the inspector should take that into account to avoid these errors?

Bye,

Jean

 

Any workaround for that?

 

Hi... I couldn't export animated USDZ from unity using this...

 

Any tutor link for this?

 

The ability to load USD files at runtime from an external source (disk, or URL) on iOS is for me (and I guess for many people) the most expected functionnality !

 

Hey guys.
We have been playing around with USD in Unity and we are thinking about building our pipeline around it.
One thing I haven't found any information on is how to get playback with alembic files in USD assets
working for animation.
We have had no problems getting animated .usd files to playback in Unity, but loading in .abc files into the USD asset will not result in playback of the alembic's animation (when using the same workflow as with .usd files).
Is there another workflow for alembics using the USD Assets.
From the information here:
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/03/28/pixars-universal-scene-description-for-unity-out-in-preview/
and here:
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/usd-unity-sdk
it sounded like it should work to load in alembic files inside the usd asset and then have them playback using timeline.
We do not want to use the "regular" unity alembic workflow, because we want to keep the alembics on the server and just reference them in using the usd asset component...

Hope somebody can give us some info on how to get this to work!
Thank you guys!!

 

Thank you very much for your answer!
I was using the second workflow: importing the alembic into the scene, but using prefab instead of as Gameobject.
I tried it again today with a very simple alembic (just a cube with a simple transform animation). This worked as expected. Apparently the problem was with the alembic I used for testing.
Are there any limitations for using alembics with the unity USD workflow? When using the alembic package and the alembic stream player in unity it plays back fine.

Another thing I noticed in my tests is that the animation of the alembic always comes in with 300 frames length regardless of the actual length of the alembics animation (my test cube has 105 frames of animation exported to .abc but loading it into timeline will create a 300 frame long track)

Thanks already for the help

 

I can't see that anyone to have already mentioned it, so... Exported USDZs don't display textures on iOS 13 QuickLook (still looks good on iOS 12 though). Also, what should be noted is that the alpha channel (i. e. opacity map of a material) is assigned separately on iOS 13 – it doesn't automatically use the A channel of the diffuse texture anymore (the A channel of the diffuse can be assigned explicitly though).

 

Is there any rough ETA for mobile support for the USD package? I am most interested in loading a usd file with custom data on it at runtime. This will allow me the ability to create, load and use cross platform, semantic assets.

I'm interested in iOS and also android (particularly the oculus quest).

 

Hi @jeremyco & @cguertin , given that Video textures and the Video player aren't supported. I quickly spun up a texture animation using timeline to animate through the textures on a 3D plane with audio, which plays well.

However, when using the USDz export, the animation isn't exported. Tried also adding the USD Recorder Track and set it up, but with little success.

Any ideas if it's possible to export a plane with an animated texture using timeline to USDz?

 

@SimonDarksideJ Maybe you have more luck with many Planes (one for each frame) and animating visibility instead of texture if you really need to get a video playing?

 

That is an interesting proposition @fherbst , one I hadn't considered. I'll give it a try.

 

@jeremyco I can't get USD to work in a project I tried today. I tried on both 2019.1 and 2019.2

Always getting:
ApplicationException: USD ERROR: Failed verification: ' fileFormat '
UnityEngine.Debug:LogException(Exception)
USD.NET.Unity.DiagnosticHandler:OnError(String)
pxr.DiagnosticHandler:SwigDirectorOnError(String)
pxr.UsdCsPINVOKE:UsdStage_CreateNew__SWIG_1(String)
pxr.UsdStage:CreateNew(String)
USD.NET.Scene:Create(String)