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HdBlackbird

A USD/Hydra RenderDelegate plugin that adds support for the Blackbird renderer (a fork of the Blender Foundation's Cycles renderer) to any client.

Its goal is to render a one-to-one representation of a USD scene with Blackbird.

This requires three components:

hdCycles (Cycles Hydra Delegate)
ndrCycles (Cycles Node Definition Registry)
usdCycles (Cycles USD Schema)

The first two of which are implemented in this repository.

Building

Requirements

Blackbird standalone libraries and headers Source
USD 19.xx+
- Most of the USD requirements need to be available (OpenSubdiv, PNG, OpenImageIO, OpenVDB ...)

Linux

Make sure to build cycles with -DCMAKE_POSITION_INDEPENDENT_CODE=ON

mkdir build
cd build

cmake -DUSD_ROOT=/path/to/usd/root               \
  -DCYCLES_ROOT=/path/to/cycles                  \
  -DCYCLES_LIBRARY_DIR=/path/to/cycles/build/lib \
  -DCYCLES_INCLUDE_DIRS=/path/to/cycles/src      \
  ..

Windows

mkdir build
cd build

cmake -DUSD_ROOT=C:/path/to/usd/root               \
  -DCYCLES_ROOT=C:/path/to/cycles                  \
  -DCYCLES_LIBRARY_DIR=C:/path/to/cycles/build/lib \
  -DCYCLES_INCLUDE_DIRS=C:/path/to/cycles/src      \
  ..

Installation

Both the hdCycles plugin and the ndrCycles plugin must be added to the PXR_PLUGINPATH_NAME environment variable.

For example:

PXR_PLUGINPATH_NAME = %HDCYCLES_INSTALL_DIR%/plugin/usd/ndrCycles/resources;%HDCYCLES_INSTALL_DIR%/plugin/usd/hdCycles/resources

Notes

usdCycles schema

To allow a full 1:1 representation of a Blender Cycles scene, we need to store Cycles specific settings in USD. To do this, we created usdCycles. More information can be found in that repo.

To prevent DCC's and tooling to not have to implement the full dependency chain of hdCycles, the usdCycles schema definition has been split into it's own repo (and rez package). Found Here!.

Building hdCycles without usdCycles is possible, but results in a very limited subsection of Cycles settings.

For full usdCycles schema support, please build with usdCycles.

Stability & Performance

The codebase is in active development and should be deemed as unstable.

The primary priority is feature-completness. Stability and performance will be addressed in the future.

Please file issues for any question or problem.

Materials

Currently Cycles materials are exported through custom additions to the Blender USD Exporter.

Of note, hdCycles expects a flattened Cycles Material graph, with no groups or reroute nodes. It also does not use the Material Output node. Instead it favours the USD/Hydra material binding inputs.

For now only BSDF nodes are registered in the ndr plugin.

Lights

Currently light node networks are unsupported via USD Lux. A proposal from Pixar plans to fix these limitations. It is planned to support proper world and light materials once the proposal is accepted.

Feature Set

Currently supported features:

hdCycles	Feature	Status	Notes
Meshes	Basic Mesh	✅
	Geom Subsets	✅
	Subdivision Surface	✅	Ability to set at render time
	Subdivision Surface (Adaptive)	❌
	Generic Primvars	✅
	UVs	✅
	Display Colors	✅
	Generic Primitives	✅	(Cube, sphere, cylinder)
	Tangents	✅
	Point Instances	✅
	usdCycles Schema Support	✅
	Motion Blur (Transform)	✅
	Motion Blur (Deforming)	✅
	Motion Blur (Velocity)	✅
	Motion Blur (Instances)	❌
Materials	Cycles Material Graph	✅	Ongoing support
	Displacement	✅
	Volumetric	✅
	OSL	❌
	USD Preview Surface	✅
	usdCycles Schema Support	✅
Volumes	VDB Support	✅	(Likely will go with foundations implementation)
Cameras	Basic Support	✅
	Depth of Field	✅
	Motion Blur	✅
	usdCycles Schema Support	✅
Curves	BasisCurves	✅
	NURBs	❌
	Point Instancing	✅
	Motion Blur (Transform)	✅
	Motion Blur (Deforming)	✅	Known slow down.
	Motion Blur (Velocity)	❌
	Motion Blur (Instances)	❌
	usdCycles Schema Support	✅
Points	Points	✅
	usdCycles Schema Support	✅
	Motion Blur (Transform)	❌
	Motion Blur (Velocity)	❌
Lights	Point	✅
	Directional	✅
	Spot	✅
	Area	✅
	Dome	✅	Limited to only one at a time
	Temperature	✅	We manually create a blackbody shader for now...
	Light Materials	❌	Pending support for new USD Light network shaders
	usdCycles Schema Support	✅
Render Settings	Basic Render Settings	✅
	usdCycles Schema Support	✅	Render Settings, Render Products, etc.
Rendering	Combined AOV	✅
	Tiled Rendering	✅
	Full AOV Support	✅
	Cryptomatte	✅
	OCIO Support	✅
	CUDA/GPU Support	❌	Should just require adjustments to build scripts

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2 license.

For a full list of third-party licenses see: LICENSE-THIRDPARTY

Attribution

This could not have been made without the help and reference of the following open source projects: