Blender | Shotgun Toolkit Engine Released

Diego_Garcia_Huerta · November 23, 2020, 5:39am

Hi Shotgun Community,

I’ve just made public the repo for the Blender Shotgun integration I’ve been working on lately:

It has been tested under Windows 10 with Blender versions from 2.82 to 2.92 (alpha). Since it has only been tested in Windows, I’m sure there will be some adjustments to make to use it for other operating systems. Also, apart from a few people recently giving it a go, the engine has not been run in production, so feedback is very much welcomed or even better contributions to the git repo.

I’ve implemented the hooks for all the default tk-apps. There are quite a lot of different type of files that can be imported into Blender, so pay special attention to the documentation regarding tk-multi-loader2 to know what is supported by the engine for now. (ie. USD not there). As always, depending on your pipeline/workflows requirements you might want to modify/tweak the hooks accordingly.

You will find handy the config folder within the repository, that contains the changes to apply to your tk-config-default2 environment config yml files, templates, engine_locations.yml , etc… to have all the tk-apps

Take a look at the README for detailed instructions on how to get the engine up and running and more information about implementation details.

Hope this opens up some options for studios that are using Blender in production, I would love to hear if you end up using it!.

Cheers,

Diego

mmoshev · November 23, 2020, 7:30am

Thank you for this work so much, Diego!

I have got to add that we successfully tested the engine with 2.90 and newest tk-multi-workfiles2 and tk-multi-publish2. We are going to try it in production really soon, so going to report how it goes.

Diego_Garcia_Huerta · November 23, 2020, 8:01am

Thank you so much for the valuable testing @mmoshev, very much appreciated! (make sure to use the latest tk-framework-shotgunutils (v5.7.7+) to avoid the threading problem you might have experienced in the early tests)

DavidMason · November 23, 2020, 9:36am

Holy Sh*t @Diego_Garcia_Huerta, you are a beast! You are making a lot of people happy and excited!

clintond · November 24, 2020, 11:52pm

Hi Diego, I hope you’re well!

Talk about amazing timing; we were just discussing the lack of SGTK Blender support and BAM, you dropped this!

I’ll get busy taking it for a spin.

clinton

clintond · November 25, 2020, 5:17am

This is now plugged into our pipe and it’s great to see SG inside Blender! Congratulations on making this happen

At first glance it seems kinda buggy/laggy in places, but it’s hard to say if that’s Blender or SG (I don’t use Blender).

Two things I noticed right away:

The Breakdown app shows legacy objects in the scene (that is, Load in some stuff, delete it, then run Breakdown and you’ll see those things still).
The Breakdown Update doesn’t work on Alembic files (it says it updated, but the object data doesn’t change).

For our workflow in Maya we Reference Alembic and update the Reference, for Houdini we path swap and Rebuild. I suspect the Alembic data being ‘Imported’ is no longer ‘linked’ to the data on disk.

In spite of these things, it’s an awesome backbone for us to plug some basic pipeline bits into.

Thanks for your efforts!

Diego_Garcia_Huerta · November 26, 2020, 2:31am

Hey @clintond, good to hear from you!

Thanks very much for testing it and running it in production, glad to hear timing was good

I found that using the latest version of Blender and latest of the tk frameworks made things a lot more stable. I do not use Blender as an artist so I imagine there will be cases where things break. If you find some of those, please use the issues in github so they can be taken a look an others are aware too.

I remember that I could not find a way to reference alembics (link in Blender terminology) so, I think the updating might not be as easy as just changing a path to the new cache, (this is what is used for other updates).
I can imagine a couple of ways:

Someone with actual Blender TD knowledge tell us if there is indeed a way to reference the abcs in the blender scene so they can be updated later.
Or (this would require changes to the hooks), when publishing caches (ie. from modeling), maybe you could publish a .blender scene that contain just that cache so it can be referenced (linked) later on that way. (I think this was my go to trick to be able to reference GPU Caches in Maya and seemed to work)

Ciao!

clintond · November 29, 2020, 9:03pm

Hi @Diego_Garcia_Huerta

Thanks for your thoughts on workflow etc.

As we use Blender more in production I’m sure we’ll build some approaches on top of the awesome work you’ve put in place. I’ll be sure to use the github page when that time comes.

Thanks again!

tannaz · December 8, 2020, 7:53pm

Chiming in late here to add my accolades to the pile! This is so awesome, Diego; thank you for this and all of your contributions to the Toolkit ecosystem!

I’ve added a listing for this to the Community Shared Integrations page.

b1gdan · December 15, 2020, 3:08pm

Hey, Diego, we spoke on Linkedin about the OBJs not being Referenced

I was speaking to someone who wrote some parts of the alias integration and they were telling me you might need to change

github.com

diegogarciahuerta/tk-blender/blob/master/hooks/tk-multi-breakdown/tk-blender_scene_operations.py

# ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Copyright (c) 2020, Diego Garcia Huerta.
#
# Your use of this software as distributed in this GitHub repository, is
# governed by the Apache License 2.0
#
# Your use of the Shotgun Pipeline Toolkit is governed by the applicable
# license agreement between you and Autodesk / Shotgun.
#
# The full license is in the file LICENSE, distributed with this software.
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------------


import os
from tank import Hook

import bpy


__author__ = "Diego Garcia Huerta"

This file has been truncated. show original

She said this would be the point here.

The approach would be to when a OBJ is imported you reference the name and timestamp

Scan scene method - list all OBJ file - the breakdown will look at the OBJ path and then the obj path will be seen in the Breakdown UI. In the background to change the obj, you need to delete in Blender the old obj import and bring in the new one.

I hope this makes sense.

D.

mmoshev · January 4, 2021, 8:33am

Hey @mexicoucg welcome to the community. I think this question better be in its own thread (don’t know if mods can move it).

The first thing to check is whether sgtk is in the PYTHONPATH. Open the Python console in Blender and try import sys; print(sys.path). Is toolkit also on P:\?

satyapol · January 27, 2021, 5:04pm

Hey! Thanks a ton for this integration.

I was able to successfully integrate this with Blender. However, when I try to save the file using Shotgun - File Save Dialog Box, I get a warning saying - “No template found”

Does any have any idea how to fix that?

Diego_Garcia_Huerta · January 28, 2021, 7:17am

Hi @satyapol,

Glad to hear you get to see the Shotgun Menu in Blender.

When does the No template found shows up, is it when you choose a task in the File Open dialog ?

Here is a quick demo how how it should look like when you create a new file for a Model task , and how to save a new version

mmoshev · January 28, 2021, 7:45am

Sounds like tk-multi-workfiles2 is not properly configured… if I had to guess.