Bifrost USD

A library of nodes to create USD-based scene graphs in Bifrost.

About the Project

This project uses the Bifrost SDK to implement the USD nodes to manipulate data types like layer, stage, prim and attribute and leverage the Bifrost Graph Editor to create and author USD scene graphs procedurally.

For Maya users, the project also includes a Maya plugin allowing to visualize USD stages created in Bifrost using the Maya USD proxy shape.

Building

You must provide the following variables to the cmake command:

• BIFUSD_PACKAGE_NAME : By default Bifrost will load the USD Pack, named usd_pack, from its installation directory. You must use a different name for your custom build of the pack.
• CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE : Debug, Release, RelWithDebInfo
• CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX : Where you want to install the bifrost-usd-pack library
• BIFROST_LOCATION : The full path to the root directory of your Bifrost installation that contains, among others, the sdk subdirectory. The USD Pack will be built against this sdk subdirectory of your Bifrost installation.
• USD_LOCATION : The full path to the root directory of your USD library installation that contains, among others, the cmake, include, lib, plugin and share subdirectories.
• MAYA_RUNTIME_LOCATION : (for the Maya extension only) The full path to the root directory of your Maya development installation that contains, among others, the bin, include and lib subdirectories.
• BIFUSD_OSX_ACTIVE_SDK : (optional) Can be set to choose a specific macOS SDK. If not set, the currently available SDK will be used.
• BIFUSD_OSX_MIN_OS : (optional) Can be set to choose the minimum macOS deployement target. If not set, macOS 11.0 will be used.
• BIFUSD_OSX_BINARY_ARCH : (optional) Can be set to choose the target architecture to build on macOS. Acceptable values are x64 (Intel CPU), arm64 (Apple M1 CPU), ub2 (Universal Binary 2 - both x64 and arm64) and empty (default) (host system's processor).

Python 3 version is assumed.

If your build uses MAYA_RUNTIME_LOCATION, you will need to use the same USD version than MayaUSD plugin.

cmake configure example:

Note: we use the Ninja generator which is a single configuration generator.

 cmake -G Ninja -S <this project path> -B <build directory path> \
            -DCMAKE_MAKE_PROGRAM=<ninja executable pathname>
            -DBIFUSD_PACKAGE_NAME="studioname_usd_pack" \
            -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="RelWithDebInfo" \
            -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<install directory path> \
            -DBIFROST_LOCATION=<bifrost path> \
            -DUSD_LOCATION="<library root path>/usd/20.11" \
            -DMAYA_RUNTIME_LOCATION=<Maya install path>

cmake build and install example:

cmake --build <build directory path> --target install

To build doxygen doc (require doxygen 1.8.14):

cmake --build <build directory path> --target usd_pack_apidoc

Testing

cd <build directory path>/test
rm `find . -name "*.usd"`
ctest . -V

Versioning

The USD Pack version is set in the cmake/version.info file. Such version number is prepended to your USD Pack name.

Loading the USD Pack in Bifrost Extension for Maya

You will need to disable the USD Pack shipped with Bifrost by setting the BIFROST_DISABLE_PACKS environment variable to "usd_pack" (export BIFROST_DISABLE_PACKS=usd_pack). Then you will need to set BIFROST_LIB_CONFIG_FILES to <your install path>/<BIFUSD_PACKAGE_NAME>-1.0.0/plugin_config.json.

plugin_config.json includes:

• usd_pack_config.json: Adds the USD nodes (available from the tab menu in the Bifrost Graph Editor).
• usd_maya_translation.json: Adds the Bifrost to Maya type translation (used to pass the USD stage from Bifrost to the mayaUsdProxyShape)

If you only need the Bifrost USD nodes

For example, if you only need to run the Bifrost standalone bifcmd tool or if you built without -DMAYA_RUNTIME_LOCATION then you can load the USD nodes in a Bifrost environment just by setting BIFROST_LIB_CONFIG_FILES to /usd_pack-1.0.0/usd_pack/usd_pack_config.json.