Export only Transforms and Point Positions for animation or Export only materials and render attributes for lookdev

[BigRoy]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I'm looking to do the following, given a DAG hierarchy:

1. Export only the material assignments + render-related geometry attributes but ignore the geometry itself. I'd like to try and export a "look" layer from Native maya geometry as opposed to Maya USD / LookdevX for some of our legacy assets. Is this even a somewhat viable idea? Basically I'd want to be able to overlay this output on top of another USD file. (This would be for Arnold jobContext exports)
2. Export only the point deformations from animation as opposed to the full geometry with UVs, etc. (I suppose that'd be a matter of dropping all data except for points and extent on a Mesh?

I imagine that'd be up to an Export Chaser to strip the attributes that I'd want to exclude. It would seem quite 'unoptimized' to first export these geometries to then "drop" parts of it in the Chaser. I'd rather influence that certain data won't be exported at all to begin with but maybe there's no option to do so.

What are my options to optimally do an export with only the data I'm interested in? Is the Export Chaser the best way (even if not optimized)? Are there any examples of Export Chaser stripping attributes/data from the USD file? (I've only seen stuff being added). Would it be a matter of removing specs?

Describe the solution you'd like

See point 1) and 2) above, those are my preferred outputs.

Describe alternatives you've considered

For 1) LookdevX (or Houdini Solaris) for shaders but that'd mean a manual conversion from our legacy assets which is time-consuming and not preferred.
For 2) not sure if there's an alternative?

Additional context

n/a

[santosd]

@samuelliu-adsk do you have an idea on this one?

[BigRoy]

I ended up with this draft Maya USD export chaser to export materials and look-related attributes only for point 1) to only preserve shaders/materials in the export, the material bindings and any arnold attributes on boundable geometry.

It can be rather hard to really pinpoint what attributes might all be of interest.

I also noticed that you couldn't mix jobContext argument with the chaser argument (see the hack in the code at the end). Is that something that should get support down the line?

[samuelliu-adsk]

Hi @BigRoy , if I understand it correctly, you are trying to export only the material to a USD file. Currently we don't support that on export time in MayaUSD, but it can definitely be done in LookdevX. To handle that in MayaUsd you might need to use the exportChaser.

[BigRoy]

Hi @BigRoy , if I understand it correctly, you are trying to export only the material to a USD file. Currently we don't support that on export time in MayaUSD, but it can definitely be done in LookdevX. To handle that in MayaUsd you might need to use the exportChaser.

@samuelliu-adsk that is indeed the case - as in my previous comment that is what I ended up prototyping. Any recommendations in that area would be more than welcome!