USD shot workflow in Houdini

USD shot workflow in Houdini#

This guide explains the USD shot workflow in Prism and Houdini.
Houdini will be used for the layout, animation and lighting department, but you can also switch to different DCCs for one or more departments.

Shot Setup#

In your Prism Project Browser create a new shot and departments in the “Scenefiles” tab.
../../../_images/usd_shot_creation.jpg
In the “Products” tab you can see that Prism automatically created a USD department layer for each department of your shot.

Note

If you don’t see the department layers, make sure you have the “Create USD department layers automatically” option enabled in the Prism Project Settings -> USD.

../../../_images/usd_shot_layers.jpg
Select the latest version and press the little tree button on the right side above the version list.
../../../_images/usd_editor_button.jpg
This will open the Prism USD Editor, where we can examine the content of the USD shot.
../../../_images/usd_shot_editor.jpg
We can see our department layers, but there are no assets in the shot yet.

Layout#

Save a new empty scene in the “Layout” department of our shot.
In the /stage context select from the tab menu: “Prism Presets” -> “3 Current Entity…”.
A “Prism Shot Setup” window will open.
Check only the “Layout” department and click “Create”.
In the blue “Work” section create a Prism LOP Import node to import the rabbit asset.
Set the “Import as” parameter to “Payload” and set the “Parent” parameter to /assets/`chs("entity")`/
Create a Camera and a Render Settings node.
At the bottom of the nodegraph on the “Prism LOP File Cache” node, click the “Execute” button to export the layout layer.
In the Prism standalone Project Browser we can now navigate to our USD shot product and open it in the Prism USD Editor.
We can see our layout layer, which contains the camera and references the asset in our shot.

Animation#

Save a new empty scene in the “Animation” department of our shot.
In the /stage context select from the tab menu: “Prism Presets” -> “3 Current Entity…”.
Check only the “Animation” department and click “Create”.

In the blue “Work” section create a transform LOP to animate the rabbit asset.

Note

If your character has a published rig as a .hda file, you can use the “SOP Create” LOP to import the rig and to animate it.

At the bottom of the nodegraph on the “Prism LOP File Cache” node, click the “Execute” button to export the animation layer.
In the Prism standalone Project Browser we can now navigate to our USD shot product and open it in the Prism USD Editor.
We can see our animation layer, which contains animation of the rabbit asset.

Lighting#

In this example we’ll use a multi-shot lighting workflow, which can be used to work on the lighting of multiple shots in one scenefile.
Create a lighting department for the sequence in the Project Browser and save a new empty scene in it.
In the /stage context select from the tab menu: “Prism Presets” -> “2 Setup Shots…”.
A “Choose Shots” window will open.
Select one or more shots (by holding the CTRL key) and click “Select”.
Now a “Prism Shot Setup” window will open.
Check only the “Lighting” department and click “Create”.

In the yellow “Shot Lighting” section create lights for your shot.
At the bottom of the nodegraph on the “Prism LOP Render” node, click the “Execute” button to render all shots.

Note

The “Executions” parameter in the “Advanced Settings” on the Prism LOP Render node defines which shots will be rendered/submitted.

In the Prism Project Browser we can now navigate to our rendered images in the “Media” tab and open them in a media player.