AYON OpenUSD Resolver

Last updated 7 months ago

What is the AYON USD Resolver?​

The AYON USD Resolver allows to load files in USD using an AYON Entity URI by resolving it at runtime to the correct filepath on your machine.

AYON USD Resolver works with any product in AYON, regardless of its type.
For example, you can use it with jpg or exr to load textures.

An AYON Entity URI may look like:

  • ayon+entity://ayontest/assets/environments/kitchen?product=layoutMain&version=4&representation=usd

  • ayon://project_name/assets/char/hero?product=modelMain&version=v003&representation=usd

AYON Entity URI Structure

AYON Entity URI starts with ayon+entity: or simply ayon:.

ayon://{project_name}/{folder_path}?product={product_name}&version={version_number}&representation={representation_name}

  • project_name: AYON Project name. Case insensitive.

  • folder_path: AYON folder path within the project hierarchy.

  • product_name: Name of the published product within the specified folder.

  • version_number: Version number of the specified product. It can be prefixed with the letter v and padded with zeros, e.g., v004 or simply 4.

  • representation_name: Representation name of the published product, e.g., usd, exr.

Pinning​

The AYON USD Resolver supports pinning. Pinning allows to retarget an entity URI or path to a 'pinned' output filepath.
When resolveing, the resolver maps the entity URI to a resulting path without requiring a server connection. This is crucial for (large) render farms to avoid the many resolves and server queries degrading the server's performance.

This is heavily used on the farm, because loading a single USD file may itself require resolving many other files resulting in potentially 1000s of resolves, requiring 1000s of AYON server queries - for each worker in your farm. Pinning avoids this completely by predefining the mapping of an AYON Entity URI to a filepath, resulting in no AYON server connection even being required at all.

Pinning files are heavily recommend for the farm

The amount of resolves a USD resolver may do can be detrimental to the performance of your server. The AYON USD Resolver does have a good local caching system, but if 100s of machines start resolving 1000s of unique URIs simultaneously there's little optimization that can be done because USD will resolve URIs one by one.

Caching​

The AYON USD Resolver has a local caching mechanism to optimize its performance in daily use. Entity URIs traditionally resolve to static paths, so caching them in your local sessions is the best way to improve performance.

API and Technical References​

FAQ