Looking into an artist request for point cloud instancing in Maya. Currently we don’t use Bifrost, but it seems on casual inspection like that might be the easiest and quickest way to get in-scene point cloud instancing working in Maya.
Anyone have experience to share with this? Alternatives?
Bifrost the graph is very powerful best thing that happen to Maya in a while in my opinion. And yes you can instance and basically do whatever you want, since is open framework and visual programming. If you have a H background is very similar VOPs/Vex
Plus the solvers are very good. I used in production for over a year because it was a Maya studio no access to H. Coming from H it took me a little bit to get used the node names but when you get passed that hurdle it becomes second nature. Also passing data between M and H is super straight forward, BF can read any point, prim, etc attributes form H and vice versa.
Also just to be clear Im not saying that BF is H btw - But is a great tool if you are in M environment and is getting better and better on each release.
I finally had time to put a quick test, even if you already figured out or even if this might not what you wanted. It might benefit someone else, as you can see is all run through BF and all procedural obviously since is done in the graph.
You can render the graph directly in Arnold and Vray since both support Maya USD, so any engine that support USD in Maya should be able to render the BF graph. I think RS is coming with a procedural and you should be able to load the the usd data directly but not yet Maya USD. Im not sure what other engines support USD at the moment.
I also added a random color for the instances and you can add any custom attribute or primvars through BF as well. There is a lot more that you can do. But that is the basics.
Plus you can also shade the prototypes through LookdevX.