Jack Purkiss

Unreal Engine USD Attribute Tools

Proto Imaging is a studio that have been producing 3D animated video for over twenty years. Predominantly using Maya, Vray and a range of compositing and post-production software, they have begun exploring the area of real-time 3D animation.

Using the Universal Scene Description (USD) developed by Pixar, this project aims to produce a set of pipeline tools to assist Proto Imaging in a workflow between Maya and Unreal Engine.

The project is divided into three sections:

the USD Attribute Function Library
interactive tools for controlling USD animations within Unreal Engine
functionality to automatically replace USD shaders with native Unreal Engine materials.

The USD Attribute function library produces a set of blueprint accessible functions allowing the user to access attributes directly from the USD at runtime.

The interactivity tools includes a set of buttons to control playback of USD animation, and a supporting function library and LevelSequencePlayerManager blueprint class to synchronise sequences.

The material swap, accompanied with other editor tools, allows a user to swap the materials on their USD with Unreal Materials automatically, based off of their names.

Thesis Unreal Engine USD Attribute Tools