
An Overview of Previsualization (Previz) Software and Methods - bryanrasmussen
http://wolfcrow.com/blog/an-overview-of-previsualization-previz-software-and-methods/
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MattRix
Based on what I've seen here, seems like something like Unity would be a
perfect choice.

~~~
erichocean
Eh, not really: Unity assets are game-oriented, not film-oriented, so film
assets require a lot of (re-)work to get them into a format that Unity can use
(or vice versa: build in Unity and then re-build later for use in your film
pipeline).

What's working better for me is Pixar's Hydra[0] renderer displaying Universal
Scene Description (USD) scenes.[1]

Hydra displays unaltered film assets at interactive frame rates easily,
supports subdivision surfaces and Alembic geometry natively, and with USD it's
trivial to incorporate caches, turn assets on and off at runtime, reuse models
from scene to scene, etc.

IMO USD is practically ideal for previz. Absolutely loving it so far, and in
the process of building a much larger pipeline around it.

The downside of USD, I guess, is it's mostly Linux-only today, though Mac OS X
and Windows ports are in progress and seem likely to be ready in the next 3-6
months. We're a Linux-only shop so it hasn't affected us.

The main thing we wish Hydra did out-of-the-box is interact with the HTC Vive.
We're looking into how to get VR rendering with Hydra and nVidia's dual-GPU VR
extension. It may be necessary to do this on Windows, unfortunately.

[0] [http://on-
demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2015/presentation/S5327...](http://on-
demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2015/presentation/S5327-Jeremy-Cowles.pdf)

[1]
[http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html](http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html)

~~~
mncharity
> The main thing we wish Hydra did out-of-the-box is interact with the HTC
> Vive. We're looking into how to get VR rendering with Hydra and nVidia's
> dual-GPU VR extension. It may be necessary to do this on Windows,
> unfortunately.

If you can create a simple fullscreen window with a stereo pair (no lens
correction needed), then you can drive a Vive on linux.[0] It's not something
you'd want to upstream to Hydra, but it makes for a surprisingly nice quick-
and-dirty placeholder.

[0] [https://github.com/mncharity/node-webvr-alt-
stack](https://github.com/mncharity/node-webvr-alt-stack) (disclaimer:author)

And FWIW,
[http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Vrui/](http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Vrui/)
is said to also have some support for Vive on linux.

