UI Hints in USD oUSD proposal #85

[JT-SCB-GameDesign]

PixarAnimationStudios/OpenUSD-proposals#85

In a presented at a WG meeting, Allison mentioned OpenDCC, and the proposal contains a reference.
This is quite exciting from what I'm grok'n so far.

I'm looking forward to this feature and platform.
Is there any additional insight the active devs can provide about the interaction between the two and any areas external collaborators might best and quickly be able to contribute?

Also, is there anyone else inspired to jump in and see ways to help keep the ball rolling?
Thanks for the great work!

[xeash]

@JT-SCB-GameDesign

Welcome! Really glad you're diving in.

I'm looking forward to this feature and platform.
Is there any additional insight the active devs can provide about the interaction between the two and any areas external collaborators might best and quickly be able to contribute?

If you're asking about the overall state of the project, it's still in the early stages. There's a lot we need to improve, especially the documentation. Right now, we're focused on making it easier for external developers to contribute.

If you're talking specifically about the topic of UI Hints in the USD oUSD proposal, we've made similar attempts in this project. As a generic USD editor, we're trying to make it more user-friendly for artists.

To support that, we added a new system that can be extended with plugins. It allows the UI to show data from various sources for specific prims, similar to how UsdPrim consults UsdSchemas. For example, when an artist selects a Shader Prim in the attribute editor, they might want to see all shader attributes from Sdr, including metadata, not just the properties.

We've used this system in various parts of the editor, like the node editor and attribute editor. Much like the UI Hints proposal, we introduced new metadata that follows the args and osl metadata spec. This lets us provide a richer and more intuitive UI for artists.

We call this system UsdPrimFallbackProxy. It has worked well in the OpenDCC Project, but it's not quite polished enough to be a formal proposal yet. It needs to be cleaner and more robust.

Also, is there anyone else inspired to jump in and see ways to help keep the ball rolling?
Thanks for the great work!

Thanks! Any contributions or feedback are very much appreciated!