Nuke to Hydra

This project implements a Hydra scene delegate for Nuke's 3D system, as well as ops to facilitate rendering 3D scenes using available Hydra render delegates.

A Note About Nuke 13

The scene delegate implementation in this project was adopted by Foundry to underpin the Hydra Viewer in Nuke 13, which is a big part of why this repo has been quiet for so long. I'm not sure where things will go from here, but I hope to be able to collaborate with them more in the future, in order to port and implement other features and goals from this project into Nuke, such as switchable render delegate support, the renderer op, USD stage side-loading, SDR support, etc.

Ultimately, the goal of this project was always to try and move the needle on getting a more modern 3D system into Nuke, and I see this as a promising first step. :)

WARNING: This project is in a fairly volatile state. I'm not totally satisfied with various aspects of the design, and there are a lot of things that still need to be implemented, so please don't rely on anything remaining the way it is. In other words, I reserve the right to force-push to master.

If all that hasn't scared you away, and you have suggestions or are interested in contributing, feel free to open an issue or submit a PR. I ask that PRs be at least somewhat substantive (no pure formatting/whitespace/comment/spelling updates), and I reserve the right to not accept them.

(Mostly) Supported Features

Meshes
Particles
Mesh instancing via particle systems (mostly)
Lights
- A set of custom Hydra light ops is included, but Nuke's native lights also generally work (though some knobs map awkwardly to the light schema params).
Render delegate settings (mostly)

Unsupported/TODO

Material authoring (#6)
Texturing (#1)
Motion blur (#2)
HdStorm support

Building

I have developed and tested the project entirely on Centos 7 so far. I plan to attempt a Windows build at some point, but trying to find old versions of the MSVC compiler to download (2015 Update 3 in Nuke's case) has proved to be quite a pain.

At any rate, if you want to build and test the project, you'll need the following:

GCC 4.8.5+
CMake 3.0+
Nuke 11.3+
USD 20.02+
- I'm not trying to support multiple USD versions at this point, and I want to stay reasonably current as Hydra continues to mature, so I'll occasionally jump ahead to a newer cut of the USD dev branch (see above note about project volatility).
Some of the USD dependencies (for headers)
- Boost Python (including headers)
- Python
- TBB

After that, building should be pretty simple:

cmake \
-D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<YOUR_INSTALL_PREFIX> \
-D Nuke_ROOT=<YOUR_NUKE_INSTALL_ROOT> \
-D PXR_USD_LOCATION=<YOUR_USD_INSTALL_ROOT> \
<SOURCE_DIR>

make -j 4 install

If you need to specify where some of the USD dependencies are located, or if they are not being found properly, try setting some of these CMake variables as needed:

TBB_ROOT_DIR
BOOST_ROOT
CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH

Testing

To test the render op, you'll need at least one render delegate that isn't HdStorm (I've been using Arnold and Embree).