Pipeline - To do - The hard stuff

Here's a list of longer, more difficult tasks that would be great additions to our pipeline.

A proper USD workflow

Our USD workflows suck enormously. We pretty much just use it as a file format and use none of the cool features that it was designed for, like having all departments working in one USD environment. We have no composition rules which makes our scene graphs messy and none of it is well integrated with the rest of our ShotGrid workflows. Changing this would be epic, but it's an enormous task.

Improving texture workflows

Our texture workflows could use some love. Right now we essentially just yeet all the texture maps into one folder and publish that folder so a simple script in Houdini can load them in and create a material. Things like file names aren't standardized and we have no metadata on which maps have been published. It would be cool if this cool all be totally revamped so future years can texture without having to worry about map names and stuff.

Creating a new Substance Painter integration

We're currently using a ShotGrid engine made by some guy online who abandoned it years ago and it no longer works in new Substance Painter versions. What we're using now is based on the deprecated and pretty terrible JavaScript (aahhhh) API. There's a new Python API in Substance these days which would be great to switch to, but as a result a whole new ShotGrid engine will have to be developed for it.

A proper caching solution for Houdini

Right now we have a simple SGTK caching node that automatically fills in a file path, but nobody uses it because it's literally just that and it has no other features. A new, more advanced caching node would be really neat.

Adding 3dequalizer to our pipeline

3dequalizer kinda sucks to integrate properly, so nobody here has done it yet. I've seen some ShotGrid integrations floating around online but haven't gotten any to work. If we could load in footage, track and solve it and publish cameras in a seamless way that would be the dream.