Hydra for Maya (Technology Preview)

The Hydra for Maya project creates a Maya plugin that replaces the main Maya viewport with a Hydra viewer. Hydra for Maya is developed and maintained by Autodesk. The project and this documentation are a work-in-progress and under active development. The contents of this repository are fully open source and open to contributions under the Apache license!

Hydra is the rendering API inside Pixar's USD.

Motivation

The goal for Hydra for Maya is to introduce Hydra as an open source viewport framework for Maya to extend the viewport render engine through Hydra render delegates. Hydra for Maya uses the previous Maya to Hydra (MtoH) code, which is part of MayaUSD, as a foundation to build on. You can find more details on what changed from MtoH here. Hydra for Maya is currently a Technology Preview; we are just laying the foundation and there is still work ahead. As the plugin evolves and the Hydra technology matures, you can expect changes to API and to face limitations.

What can it do?

With the Hydra for Maya plugin, you can:

Use Storm as the default render delegate for Maya's viewport.
Render and interact with most of Maya's node types.
Use different render delegates using USD/Hydra's plugin system.
Natively view USD data with USD Extension for Maya through HdSceneIndex.
Use Hydra side-by-side with Maya's current Viewport 2.0.

Current Limitations

The Hydra for Maya plugin has the following isses and limitations:.

The USD stage is only viewable. Interactive transform edits are not working with the v22.11 USD release (Fixed by https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/USD/commit/9516b96e90).
UsdGeomCapsule, UsdGeomCone, UsdGeomCube, UsdGeomCylinder, and UsdGeomSphere are not supported. UsdGeomMesh can be used as an alternative.
MaterialX is not supported.
Only direct texture inputs are supported for Maya materials.
Limited support for Maya shader networks.
Drawing issues with selection and highlighting.
Hydra shading differs from Maya's Viewport 2.0.
Blue Pencil is not supported.
Screen space effects like depth of field and motion blur are not supported through Storm.
The following Maya node types are not viewable:
- Bifrost
- nParticles
- Fluid
Arnold lights are not supported with Storm.
Animation Ghosting has the wrong shading.

Detailed Documentation

Building the mayaHydra.mll plugin
Technical details of MayaHydra
Selection in MayaHydra

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