Hydra render delegate availability, status and features

Community Hydra
1

It would be useful to have a bit of on overview as to the current state of various Open Source Hydra render delegates.

When working with the current OpenUSD release, 23.08 (or previous version, 23.05), Storm appears to be the only up to date Open Source project that produces useful output. I tried the Embree plugin included with USD 23.08, but unless I am mistaken, this is a very simple delegate that does not have support for materials / textures.

Which other projects are being actively developed or maintained to keep up with USD releases? What features do they support?

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Welcome to the forum and thanks for posting the first post!

I haven’t tried either but perhaps one of these might meet your criteria of open source and featurefull

There’s a list of a lot of products that support USD and Hydra on the OpenUSD project page Products Using USD — Universal Scene Description 23.08 documentation

I’m not sure how out of sync any of them are at any given moment compared to the OpenUSD repo, but in theory they should work.

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Can this project provide more example about hydra? I want to use storm vulkan backend, but I don’t know how to start.

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@yangfengzzz , I’m not aware of a Vulkan example. Perhaps @tomc might have something.

There is the Hydra presentation from SIGGRAPH 2019 , as well as our Apple example for Metal that might serve as starting points though.

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It might be nice to create sticky posts for lists of render delegates and other integrations, as well as proposals (like Dhruv’s first post) and documentation/resources.

Note that Storm only really supports OpenGL and Metal right now; the Vulkan integration is a work in progress, but as we land the rest of it this fall we’ll be talking more about it. Currently, Storm chooses between OpenGL and Vulkan based on the HGI_ENABLE_VULKAN environment variable; otherwise, the integration is the same. If you’re using a GL framebuffer, Storm will blit the (Vulkan) hydra results to GL automatically.

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Yeah I agree a summary post like you suggested would be great. If you, or someone more familiar with Hydra than myself, wanted to write one up, we can pin it here.

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Add to the list of up to date ones Hydra NSI:

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