Hydra is a rendering architecture part of USD, designed to abstract the
host application from the renderer. A renderer implementing a Hydra
render delegate can run in any host application supporting Hydra, which
now includes Blender.
For external renderers this means less code to be written, and improved
performance due to a using a C++ API instead of a Python API.
Add-ons need to subclass bpy.types.HydraRenderEngine. See the example in
the Python API docs for details.
An add-on for Hydra Storm will be included as well. This is USD's
rasterizing renderer, used in other applications like usdview. For users
it can provide a preview of USD file export, and for developers it
serves a reference.
There are still limitations and missing features, especially around
materials. The remaining to do items are tracked in #110765.
This feature was contributed by AMD.
Ref #110765
Co-authored-by: Georgiy Markelov <georgiy.m.markelov@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Vasyl-Pidhirskyi <vpidhirskyi@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Brian Savery <brian.savery@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Brecht Van Lommel <brecht@blender.org>
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/104712
04bb5f9995