HdAurora is a USD Hydra render delegate that allows Aurora to be used in applications that implement a USD Hydra scene delegate.
Hydra is a framework used by many applications such as Autodesk Maya to support multiple renderers implemented as render delegates. Examples of other render delegates include HdStorm, a rasterization renderer that uses OpenGL, Vulkan, and Metal, and HdArnold, which enables the use of Autodesk Arnold.
To learn more about Hydra, see this presentation from SIGGRAPH 2019 as well as the USD documentation.
The easiest way to run HdAurora is using the usdview tool, which is part of the USD toolset that is used for viewing USD files.
Once HdAurora has been deployed to your USD folder you can select HdAurora in usdview using the renderer menu with the Aurora option:
In this section, we explain how to run usdview using HdAurora with the default Aurora build, and how to deploy HdAurora to a custom USD installation if it is preferred. The commands in this section require "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019".
If Aurora is built with the default build steps, usdview and required USD binaries are automatically deployed with HdAurora binaries. Assuming the root of Aurora source tree is AURORA_ROOT, the following build steps deploy usdview automatically:
cd %AURORA_ROOT%
python Scripts\installExternals.py --build-variant Release ..\AuroraExternals
cmake -S . -B Build
cmake --build Build --config Release
Before running usdview with HdAurora, you need to configure the run environment with:
set PYTHONPATH=%AURORA_ROOT%\Build\bin\Release\python
set PATH=%PATH%;%AURORA_ROOT%\Build\bin\Release
To render the Autodesk Telescope USD model with HdAurora, simply extract the ZIP file into ASSET_DIR, and run the following command.
usdview %ASSET_DIR%\AutodeskTelescope.usda --renderer=Aurora
For users who want to use their own USD build, Aurora provides deployHdAurora.py to deploy HdAurora to the custom USD installation. deployHdAurora.py can also create a new USD installation if one does not exist, using the --build option.
Run the following command to build a new USD installation located at ..\USD relative to the the root of Aurora source tree ( AURORA_ROOT). This will take about 30 minutes to complete and will require 10 GB of disk space.
cd %AURORA_ROOT%
python Scripts\deployHdAurora.py ..\USD --externals_folder=..\AuroraExternals --config=Release --build
You can then run usdview from the bin subdirectory within that installed USD directory. To render the Autodesk Telescope USD model with HdAurora, simply extract the ZIP file into ASSET_DIR and run the following commands.
cd ..\USD\bin
usdview %ASSET_DIR%\AutodeskTelescope.usda --renderer=Aurora