Animated transforms not properly backed to its own xform prim path when exporting to USD

[frankchen211]

Describe the bug
If we have animation on parent xforms, but no visible meshes under the parent transfrom node, those transfrom node won't be write to usd xform prim, or instead all animation xfrom data are baked to mesh.

We would like to reference or add more assets into that parent xform to share the animation based on the expored usd stage, but how to do that if animation is not recored in the correct prim path?

[autodesk-oss-arnold-bot]

Issue synced internally to ARNOLD-14016

[sebastienblor]

If I understand well, you're using the Arnold-USD export from Maya ?
What you describe is one of its design limitations, as this option converts the scene to arnold and then saves it to usd. And in Arnold xforms do not exist, so this information gets lost and we only save the final matrices to the leaf meshes.

That's one of the reasons why you should instead use the MayaUSD export with the "Arnold" plugin configuration enabled. This will let mayaUSD export the generic maya data, including transforms, meshes, etc... and arnold will just add its additional data on top of it

[frankchen211]

If I understand well, you're using the Arnold-USD export from Maya ? What you describe is one of its design limitations, as this option converts the scene to arnold and then saves it to usd. And in Arnold xforms do not exist, so this information gets lost and we only save the final matrices to the leaf meshes.

That's one of the reasons why you should instead use the MayaUSD export with the "Arnold" plugin configuration enabled. This will let mayaUSD export the generic maya data, including transforms, meshes, etc... and arnold will just add its additional data on top of it

Thank you for your rely, I have tried this method later, but when I import a scene using MayaUSD export with Arnold plugin and read in Katana, Katana UsdIn or AnorldIn node still have problems and can't get the correct result.

[sebastienblor]

ok, which problem did you have exactly with the mayaUSD way ? That would be something we want to fix.

[BigRoy]

@frankchen211 are you able to still provide more information regarding the issue you faced with a Maya-USD export instead? Otherwise this issue will remain lingering.