Happy New Year Omniverse Community!
We are excited to announce our new release of Blender is on the Omniverse Launcher under the Alpha dropdown menu option. This is based on the Blender 3.4 alpha USD branch and we have added a new Audio2Face (A2F) add-on and Scene Optimizer add-on for enhanced Omniverse workflows.
Omniverse Audio2Face Panel
The Audio2Face panel was designed to address some of the pain points users were experiencing in taking their Blender characters into Audio2Face, as well as making it easier to bring generated shape keys back onto their rigs. Meshes can be prepped on the Blender side now, and there is a one-click export to USD with meshes pre-selected as dynamic or static for the Audio2Face solve. Once shapes are generated, there is also a new set of functionality to bring the exported USD back into Blender and apply those shapes to a character, even if it is fully rigged. We’re excited to see what the community does with this functionality, and hope to provide further workflow enhancements in the future.
Checkout this Rig a Face video by Markom3D.
Omniverse Scene Optimizer Panel
3D scanned with photogrammetry by WDS-LAB.
The Optimizer panel is a way for Blender users to create more real-time compatible USD files. Users can fix bad geometry, generate automatic UVs, and decimate high-resolution CAD data to more usable polycounts. Depending on user requirements, this can be as low as ten percent of the original counts, resulting in a large reduction in file size and a reduction in both CPU and GPU ram usage. Further, to promote the streaming of extremely large scenes the panel has a Chop feature for dicing large, heavy meshes into more easily usable pieces. Users can also export optimized USD files directly from their scenes without modifying the scenes in memory.
Features
- New Audio2Face add-on to improve the A2F auto Rig workflow.
- New Scene Optimization add-on.
- Defined Primitives Only import option (can be disabled to allow importing primitive overrides).
Bug Fixes
- Fixed issues with incorrect TIFF extension in texture asset paths.
- Resolved error creating group node sockets.
- Merge Blender 3.4 master branch changes (up to commit 68a08460 of Nov 29, 2022).
We appreciate the Community feedback and want to hear more about how you are using Blender in Omniverse workflows.
Upcoming we are working on a Blender connector with Nucleus support, updating our materials mapping tool, and adding more features to the Audio2Face add-on.
Thank you!