VRED Metadata: Post-Its Passed Down the Pipeline

DAWN MCARDLE: Welcome. Thanks for being here today. I chose to call this presentation Metadata- Post-its Passed Down the Pipeline because I like to think of this feature in VRED as something that is like many people passing notes to each other about a file as it travels from person to person or from one tool to another.

But first of all, what is metadata? If you have ever posted a travel photo on social media, you may have had the option to include its location where the photo was taken. How did it know? Some files may have extra data embedded in them, which is not apparent. Here, you can see when the photo was taken and some specs about my camera phone.

In the file's properties or even if you look at the file on Photoshop, this hidden information may include all kinds of other things like the camera model used, the focal length, the pixel size, even your GPS location. But I'm not here to talk about Photoshop. I just wanted you to think about this example because it's something you might be a little more familiar with. In the same way, a 3D scene may include all kinds of hidden information. I'll show you how to uncover this with an Autodesk VRED and how it can be used in your workflows.

But back to my question about the definition of metadata. So to answer my own question, in general, metadata is hidden pieces of information attached to data. And it can travel with that data from app to app. You can think of this as a way to include notes with a shared file. And you might not even see them unless you're looking for them.

In VRED, this information can be accessed by scripts that allow you to customize your scene. Uncovering this information may minimize the need to research about all the many details you might need to know about it in order to make an accurate visual model.

Now before we go any further, I want to show you the safe harbor statement. And I'm not going to make you read through all of this, but it basically says that while I'm talking, I might talk about something that we're planning in the future. Who knows what might slip out? But please don't make any purchasing decisions based on the information you hear today.

Having worked in multiple automotive design studios, I was responsible for compiling data that changed sometimes every day. This required gathering all kinds of information from my colleagues. I might need to ask things like what was the original scanned texture size or which parts go with each color material finish theme? When was this part approved? Which lights were used to bake the interior? This class will show you how to access and utilize this hidden information in Autodesk VRED.

If you are someone who contributes to a model that will be passed down the pipeline and eventually end up in VRED or someone who works primarily using VRED, you may be interested to learn more about how this information can be utilized. We're going to dig into what it looks like to do all these things on this list, starting with understanding the metadata editor layout, how to populate it, and some ideas on how to access information stored in it to streamline your workflows.

To set honest expectations, this class is very technical, and it's not going to cover how to create hot car renderings. But in order to do that, you have to have proper data prep. So this is a very integral part of that.

Starting with the VRED 2023.3 release, a new tool became available, which allows all kinds of information to be seamlessly included with the data. Metadata is directly attached to nodes like geometry, lights, materials, cameras to name a few or it might exist indirectly. It could be attached to a container of these scene elements.

Previously, you could only see some of this information in the Node Editor. This feature has been greatly improved. It's called the Metadata Editor now. You could always see metadata here, but it wasn't so easy to work with.

Currently, metadata created in these formats is retained invisible when imported into VRED, including Catia, NX, Inventor to name a few. Some material files coming from third-party software include metadata like Substance and Xrite. FBX is the only format we can currently export metadata from VRED.

And in case you're unfamiliar with VRED, I'll tell you what it is. It's a visualization software which is used to create live or output imagery. It's often used to help within product design studios to help them make decisions. It's used to validate engineering.

And animations and renderings can be created. And they're used in press releases, teasers, digital showrooms, building price configurators, all these above and more. It's capable of creating realistic, high-quality raytraced images and true-to-scale virtual reality experiences. And besides products, we're even seeing it used to design factories and architectural things like that.

Some people I've worked with have asked me how do you pronounce VRED. And some pronounce it "v-red" and some say "vred." Either is correct.

So here's a movie that shows some images I created in my former life before I worked at Autodesk. I used VRED to create these product renderings, and I did a few press releases for Waymo and for Rivian and a few more product renders I did to learn my craft and practice lighting and composition. Of course, car renders. How could you leave those out?

And I was experimenting with substance for a month to see what kind of textures I could come up with. And since I've been at Autodesk, I've learned to do SubD modeling and these are some renderings of some of the models I created.

So a little bit more about me. I've been using VRED since 2013, which was shortly after it became available in the US. At that time, I worked for an Autodesk reseller where I learned to use it. And then I trained other professionals how to use it. And then I spent some time at a number of automotive design studios who needed some urgent help with some projects for a few weeks here, a few months there.

And prior to that, I used to work with Maya. And I did animation content for commercials and broadcast. If you ever seen any of the Titanic series on the Discovery Channel in the mid '90s, that was me. Here, I'm giving away my age.

Would you believe one of my first jobs was working in a place that did laser light shows? And I actually drew and traced animations, cells that were synced to music. So I've seen a lot of technological changes throughout my career. And being here at Autodesk, I love being able to just get a glimpse of what's coming next.

So I joined Autodesk a little over two years ago. And I work primarily with customers who use Alias and VRED, helping them to understand workflows and making sure they have got all the resources they need to do great work. I also help advocate the priority and details of cases they submit to our development team. Personally, I think that I just love VRED. I think it's a lot easier to learn and use than other comparable software that's capable of the same or quality that's comparable.

So what are some possible reasons you might want to use metadata in VRED? Here are a few examples. You can include notes about when data was approved or when it was created. You might want to include the exact dimensions of a backplate or a model or even the price a part might cost. Lights can contain lumen information coming from a supplier. And textures can contain height and width dimensions from the original scan or even more detailed information about the color or finish that's just too long to put in its name.

In complex models, you can search for any kind of category name such as all the windows or all the doors. Your search words don't have to be in the node names. Visualization designers sharing files can send notes along with those files, such as which lights were baked with an interior versus an exterior. And this is very useful when new geometry is added to the scene and the ambient occlusion needs to be calculated in the same way. Or they could create a set including say just the interior parts and shoot that over to the render. Or they could pick heavy drivetrain parts to delete based on details that aren't included in the geometry name.

They could use a script to retest late-specified geometry that they want to have coarser or denser mesh after it's already imported. And you can use metadata to store camera settings which are post-processing volume controls similar to a game engine workflow. These are just a few examples of how metadata can be leveraged. But there really isn't any limit. You might find new uses based on your custom workflows. And I'd be really curious to hear about what those are.

So throughout this presentation, I'll be showing you some short videos and screenshots so you can see what these tools look like in the user interface. Next, I'll show you the editors in VRED where you'll find metadata tags, meaning the information is directly attached to these nodes. On the left is the Metadata Editor. And on the right is a corresponding editor containing nodes with metadata directly attached such as on this slide, there are geometry nodes in the scene graph. And we can see those tags next to them. We can read what tags say in the metadata editor and edit them and add new ones.

Lights-- this one contains information about the catalog number, energy value, and the manufacturer. Cameras-- I see some information that could help me match camera footage such as the focal length and even the height the camera was from the ground. You can type anything you want into the metadata.

Sceneplates-- the source of the photo is documented here. So say I wanted to see if there was another angle photo that existed, I know I could go to Adobe Stock and look there. Materials-- those coming from substance or Xrite often have useful information attached like the scan texture size and the author. And with all these editors, you can filter to those nodes that only include metadata if you choose to. So here on the right in the Material Editor, I see four materials that contain metadata so that it obscures all the others, and I'm just looking at them.

New to the asset manager is a tab where you can store metadata. You can bring this data into your scene and assign it to the nodes. And it will be available for reuse. So if you come back tomorrow, log out, log in, turn your computer off, it'll still be here. An example of how you might use this is maybe you're an approver and you have a certain stamp you want to put on all your data. You could just drag this into your scene and reuse it every time.

Rather than listing metadata by one of these editors I just spoke about, you can also list buy sets, which may contain multiple kinds of metadata. Here, I see a set that contains material and camera tags. Or you can list it by all objects, which shows tags from your scene coming from all the different editors. And they may or may not include sets. So I see sets, along with individual materials and geometry nodes, in this example.

When it's set to all objects together, you can see some of the different icons, including different geometry types. I see NURBS. And I see mesh, also a group, and one that's been transformed. There's different types of icons for materials. There's a switch, a substance material, and also one from assets.

You can open the Metadata Editor from any of these other editors by double-clicking on a tag. In this GIF, I'm just clicking on the tag next to the spotlight. And that opens the Metadata Editor for me.

In this image, the metadata is listed by sets. A set is a way to organize information. It may contain one or multiple nodes, or it could be empty. You may see a combination of geometry, cameras, lights, et cetera, included all in the same set.

The leftmost column is split into an area above and below. And you can grab those dots and pull it up or down if you just want to see one or the other. The lower area shows the selected set contents from above.

In this image, we're looking at some metadata attached to a geometry node called Pulley. It lives in the Pulley set. Its associated metadata is on the right, categorized in these three columns-- type, key, and value. These together are referred to as entries. This information usually gets more specific going from left to right.

You can search for text contained in these entries. What's nice about this is the text doesn't have to be in the node names. So it can be much more detailed.

Clicking on the arrow allows me to filter what I see in this lower left area. I've chosen to see scene graph nodes associated with this helmet part. The actual metadata is on the right.

If the Expansion column is not displayed, pull the grip and expose it. And this works in any of these editors.

Next, I'll show you where to find the Metadata Editor in VRED other than clicking on a tag and opening it, and how to unlock information coming from imported files. I've imported a step assembly file from GrabCAD. You can see these tags mean that metadata is directly attached to these geometry nodes. But where is the Metadata Editor?

From the top menu, if you go to Scene and go down to Metadata-- sorry, Metadata Editor, this is how you open it up. In this scene, my metadata is organized by sets. And there are a lot in this file. But if you look on the right, you can see that they are grayed out or locked. So to unlock them, you need to select all the sets, right-click, and go to Edit, Unlock. Now all this information is editable.

From the Metadata Editor, I can select nodes that live in the scene where they live. They'll be picked in their respective editors.

So in this example, I'll open geometry nodes that originate from the scene graph. From the Metadata Editor, I'll go to Select Objects and Scene Graph. And I could have chosen any of these other editors listed here, like those that reside in the materials or the cameras, for example. The nodes I have filtered below have metadata directly attached to them. And they're also picked in the scene graph.

Here's a screenshot of the end of that movie in case you missed it. In the yellow highlighted area in the lower right, I see the geometry from the set listed, since it's currently filtered by scene graph. And it looks like this metadata includes a date and a specific part number, if you look over in the right Type, Key, and Value columns.

These same geometry nodes associated with a set are now selected in the scene graph, also. So if you find them in the Metadata Editor, then you can select them in your scene more easily, sometimes.

You can create, add, and remove data to a set. So I'll show you how to populate a set. So I have these sets. And I'm going to search for a specific one called Helmet Set. So I just start typing it in to my search. And if I expand it, I see it includes a back plate, and also a material. I can add additional tag data to this set.

So in my Material Editor, I have filtered for just those materials containing metadata. And next, I'm going to drag and drop this plastic visor material into my helmet set in the Metadata Editor. So I drag it right on top of the name. And I can just as easily remove it by clicking on it and saying Remove Selected Assignments.

So I'll get rid of that search. And now I'm going to create a new set by right-clicking and going to New Set. I'll rename this Primitives. And now I want to add geometry to the set before we added a material. And in the same way, you can drag and drop it. But you can drag either the node from the editor onto the set or you can drag the set onto the node in the editor. Either way works.

So here, I will show you how that works. Zoom out a bit. I'll drag the Torus geometry into the primitive set. And I'll drag a different helmet set onto Torus. And you can see that Torus now lives in two different sets.

This workflow step is useful creating-- for creating sets containing specific objects and materials that you want to combine together. Soon, I'll show you how to display only what's in a particular set while other things remain hidden.

So let's do a quick review about the Metadata Editor and sets. So the same metadata node can belong to more than one set. And you might have all kinds of scene nodes containing metadata directly, but never put in a set. It's possible that they don't live in a set. And it's also possible to have empty sets containing entries, but no nodes, like, for example, maybe you just want to create a set that has some information pertaining to the entire scene file instead of a node that it could contain.

So I'll show you what the tag icons mean next. I'll filter just to see the geometry included in a set. So in this dropdown, I see different editors. And I'm choosing the Scene Graph Editor. And then I click on the arrow to activate this filter. And the column is split with sets above and scene graph contents below.

When I expand the Scene Graph node, I see an outline icon, which is the node containing metadata. And the solid tags denote sets that the Torus belongs to.

So I showed you how to create a set. And now I'm going to show you how to populate a set with specific kinds of information. The spotlight doesn't belong to a set. You see-- remember, there's no solid tags below it, just the outline tag. It does have three entries. Maybe they came with it from another app. And I can create additional entries by right-clicking on any note associated with it in the Metadata Editor.

Here are all the kinds of entries I can create. And all these will show up in the Type column. So I'll tell you a little bit about what they are. So a string could be any text, very general. An integer is a number. And that can be either positive or negative. And a float is a number with a decimal, which might be good if you wanted to include a price.

Boolean means true or false. For example, was the part approved, yes or no? You can assign current time, date, or both, or you can choose the specific date. You might want to use this to specify when a part was approved, for example.

List offers multiple rows of text information. And these lines of text show up as a continuous string in the Value column. Tag is usually associated with materials. The value is usually a description of the key. Keys can be any text. It would make sense to make a key a category of some sort. And value should describe details within that category.

You can't have more than one key with the same name. This way, when you search for a key-value pair, it may find several value options. For example, if you have the key Author, then you could have several values that are people's names who are the author. You can have multiple values containing the same information-- for example, all light intensities with the same number or all revisions created on the same day.

In this movie, I'll show you what it looks like to create an entry. So here's a spotlight. And I see it already has three entries that came along with it-- Catalog Number, Energy Value, and Manufacturer.

I'll right-click on the spotlight and create a new float type of entry. I'll rename the key Lumens and give it a value of 1.5. You can create and edit metadata by changing the information in the keys and values.

Looking in the Material Editor, I see four materials that have metadata tags. The plastic visor material has some information here in this box, in its attributes. I see Approved and Plastic Reflective. These tags show up as keys in the Metadata Editor on the left. There's one for Plastic Reflective and one for Approved, which were created with the material. They automatically say VRED Tag in the value. Aftermarket was added from the Metadata Editor.

To add tags from the Material Editor, type them in here, in this area. It automatically shows up in the Metadata Editor. New tags can be added from either editor.

For tags coming from the Material Editor, I can edit the key, but not the value. They will show up as VRED Tag. If you see this and you didn't add the tag, it's most likely associated with an x-rite or substance material. But you can add additional entries, including the values, to that material from the Metadata Editor.

Once I've created a tag, I can reuse it. There's this dropdown where I can pick an existing tag and reuse it rather than typing it in again.

Moving on to some ways we can use this metadata now that we have a pretty good idea of what it looks like in the UI, one cool thing you can do is use a Python script driving metadata information to do a size conversion. Substance materials often include a physical size-- physical size dimensions. But since they come in as centimeters, I can use a simple script to change them to millimeters.

So in the next movie, I'll show you what this looks like. The material attribute measurements aren't matching the metadata information. In the Metadata Editor, I see the dimensions are in millimeters. Sorry, that was the Material Editor. In the Metadata Editor, I see them in centimeters. I've got a script in the Variant Editor that will convert the values of the texture size and enter this into the attributes automatically.

So watch closely when I double-click on the variant. And the numbers in the material attributes will change. I'm double-clicking the variant. And now I see that the texture changed from 10 millimeters to 288.6 millimeters based on the 28.86 centimeters included in the metadata information. I also see the texture on the preview ball looks correct now.

I've had challenges keeping clean scene graph trees when working with models that share components. For example, in one project, I juggled trying to organize a scene that had both an SUV and a truck. They shared some components, like the front end and lamps and tires. But other components were independent. So it was really hard to keep all the geometry switches under each main vehicle and have the right parts in the right places. Sometimes, it was just easier to duplicate components for each theme and control visibility that way.

The problem is, as you probably know, that creates a huge file. I'm going to show you a solution workflow. It's a very simple example of how to use metadata plus variants plus scripts to control visibility. Rather than changing the scene graph structure, I'll instead use a script to call out metadata sets to be either active or inactive. This drives both materials and geometry to be visible or invisible.

In this movie, I've already created empty metadata sets. And I'll populate them by dragging and dropping the corresponding geometry nodes into them. So first, I'll pick all my exterior parts and drag them right into my exterior set. And I'll drag my interior set onto my one interior node. And I'll drag my two wheel-related geometry into my wheel set. Remember, you can either drag the nodes onto the set or the set onto the nodes.

I have some Python scripts in the Variant Editor that connect to sets in the Metadata Editor. When I activate the variant, it activates the information in the set to be visible. So in my variants, I'll click on Exterior Only, Interior, Wheels. And then everything is visible.

Here's how that works. If a group of geometry nodes is included in a set and that set is mentioned in this script contained within a variant and it's set to True, then it will be visible. If that same geometry group is not included in another set, then it will be invisible. A different script inside another variant set is driving this connection. It's looking for a set name. And it makes its contents visible when set to True.

Let's take a look at a more complex scene which shows not only geometry visibility controlled by metadata, but also materials. As I click on these variants called Blue Sky and White Light, which represent different material and geometry themes, it accesses a metadata set. And you can see the live models materials update.

And you can take a look at the-- notice that the wheel geometry design is changing also, depending on what's included in the set that's being accessed. And these wheel options don't need to be in a geometry set in your scene graph. When you reduce the scene graph complexity, this can significantly increase performance in VR, which is bonus.

In the next movie, I'm going to add an additional theme. The new one will have a different body materials and a third wheel option, too. So as you've seen, I have two existing themes called White Light and Blue Star. And I'm going to create a third theme.

So I'll start by duplicating an existing set rather than redoing the work all over again. And I'm just going to rename that to Silver Star. And it duplicated this Wheel Gen. I'm just going to get rid of that and, instead, bring in a different Wheel Aurora design option.

Let's take a look at the scripts. So now that I populated the metadata set, I need to make some adjustments to the variant scripts. So again, instead of doing the same work over, I'm just going to change a few things, copy, paste, make sure that I duplicate this line of script so that all three of these themes have three lines with one set to True and the other two set to False.

So I'll copy this line, add it to the Blue Sky. And then I'll just duplicate this entire variant set, rename it to Silver Star, and make sure it's set to True and the other two are set to False.

So next, I want to check my work. And if I did all this correctly, I should have three themes with three different wheel designs and a variety of switch materials activated. So I'll click on Blue Sky, White Light, and Silver Star-- looks good.

I was able to create themes without rearranging the scene graph or needing geometry switches, or maybe you don't want to change the scene graph structure too much for another reason. Maybe you want to be able to import reference files without any problems or maybe you want to retain the original file names. So this is a workflow that will allow you to do that.

Next, I'm going to show you how a switch material can be added to a metadata set. In this example, I want to change the wheel detail color. So the wheel detail color is controlled by the set contents, as I mentioned. And this scene includes a switch material containing these four color options for the wheel detail. The switch includes flop, white, blue, and silver. And I'm going to drag this switch material into my Silver Star metadata set.

So just drag and drop it right into that metadata set for Silver Star. And now I need to create an entry to tell it which of those four colors to be active. So I'll close that down and right-click on my Silver Star, create entry String. And I'll change the key to the name of the material, which is Switch Wheel Paint. And the value needs to be the color option that I choose. In this case, I'll do flop. So now when I activate the variant, you can see the wheel detail changed to the purple flop color.

Maybe I want to change this to a different color. So while it's still up, I'm going to change flop to, say, a different color, like white, activate my variant, and here we can change it quickly. And it's accessing the particular material that's in a switch that we choose.

And since I've got all these different switch materials in the same set, I can also change the switch material associated with the body paint. So I'll go and click on that metadata, which is currently set to White. And I'll change it to flop, activate the variant, and you can create all kinds of different combinations and themes pretty easily this way.

So continuing with the next steps in this workflow, I may want to do a live presentation or I may want to throw some renders to the queue. With this way of working, you can have a clean UI and-- for reviews, or you can set up renders based on metadata information.

And now that I've got everything working, I can set hotkeys to these variants. So going to the General tab in my variants, looking at Blue Sky, it's already got number 1 associated with a hotkey. And White Light has number 2. So I'll go to Silver Star. And I'll choose number 3. Then I'll go full screen. And the UI is hidden. So I only need to press 1, 2, and 3 to switch between all these themes.

Once the variants are set up, you can also choose to easily render them. So here on the right, I'm in my render settings under the Variant Sets tab. And I checked on Render Variant Sets. And now all I need to do is drag and drop all the variants I want to render into this gray area. I'll just put all three of those in. And I won't make you sit through my renderings. But I ray' trace rendered them. And the final results are these three images.

So to summarize, variant set scripts are looking for nodes included in metadata sets. In this way, I can set up combinations of geometry and materials to make visible.

So we just learned that an advantage to working with metadata sets connected to variant sets is we don't have to rearrange the scene graph to control which things are visible. But another reason to work in a similar way is to adjust tessellation after import.

As you probably know, we can achieve a higher frame rate with less polys. This can mean the difference between an awesome VR experience or a dizzy one that no one ever wants to come back and experience again.

Sometimes, it doesn't make sense to do this, though, like you might not want to lower the tessellation if you're analyzing surface quality in VRED. And it does come through realistically on NURBS models.

Other times, it does make sense to decrease the tessellation on geometry when it's not the focus. For example, you might be focusing on the interior and the exterior is obscured, or you might have a collection of vehicles way out in the background, and it looks good enough with fewer polys.

Another reason you might want to adjust tessellation is to control how it looks when exporting out as an FBX to another software. And maybe your vehicle is going to end up in a game and you want different versions on hand.

So the script you see here accesses other simple scripts. I have a variant set for High Tessellation and another one for Coarse. It's looking for a metadata set with the same name. And this only works with NURBS, by the way.

I've used a combination of simple scripts accessing metadata to achieve this. The script on the left tells VRED which quality settings to use for each level. You could choose from Coarse, Low, Medium, or High in this case. The two scripts on the right tell VRED to access specific metadata sets. And here's where you type in their custom names.

The image on the bottom shows the metadata set containing the rim geometry. Remember, we pulled that Aurora rim into one of our sets. And I could add a couple more variants for low and medium tessellation in the same way, if I chose to.

The Metadata Editor allows advanced queries to narrow down selections of details contained in keys and values. Previously, we could only search based on node names in the scene graph. I'll show you how to search for metadata, including a specific date.

So two of those themes we just looked at that were pre-created were created on July 31. So in this example, I'll look for all the sets that were created today. I'll click the Search and go to plus. And for the metadata type, I want a date. And then I need to add a value. And this value is November 15. So I'll find that on the calendar. And you can see that it found Silver Star, the one I created today.

Let's try a different value. I'll go back to the ones created on July 31. And you can see that these other two sets were created. And they both have July 31 in the value.

I could select contents of those sets. And they'll be selected in their respective VRED editors and picked in your scene. This is an easy way to find scene data that's connected in ways that you choose.

In the same way, I can search to find which sets contain a specific material. I want to find out whether any sets contain one of the options in a switch material for glass, which is called Glass Gold.

So I'll just start a new search, getting rid of the search that was there. And I only need the Value field. So I'll add that back in again. And here, I'll enter the name of that material, which is Glass Gold. And it tells me that the set Blue Sky does include that material. When I click on it and looking in the metadata, I see Glass Gold is included in the set.

Next, I'll show you a search example using a more complex assembly. So in the graphic, you can see this hospital has many walls and windows and all kinds of architectural elements. It's got lots of geometry parts as well as sets. And I want to narrow down my search to one particular wall. If you look in the middle of that graphic, it's a little darker color. So I'm going to find that in a sea of the data that's very dense.

So first, I want to find only the third level walls. I'll click on the Search and hit the plus to add a new row, choosing the metadata type String and adding a key, which is Base Constraint, and a value, which is Level 3. And then I'll pick all these in the Metadata Editor and select them in my scene and isolate them. So the sets that are narrowed down to this criteria are independent of what they're named in the scene graph.

Next, I'll refine the search to only include those with a specific top offset. And if you have really good eyesight and you look around the middle of my list of metadata selected, you'll find Top Offset. And it currently has a value of negative 3 feet.

So again, I'll go back to my search, add a new row, again, with a string as the type. The key this time will be Top Offset. And I'll look for those that have a value of negative 4 feet, select those objects in my scene, and isolate. And you can see this is a much smaller group of wall sets than we had previously.

I'll refine the search a third time. And this time, I want to find those walls that are only located in a specific area. So we learn by repetition-- again, a new row. The type is String. And this key is going to be area. And for value, I'll select 324 SF.

And now I'm down to four basic walls. But I'm looking for that one. So I'm going to change my number here in the value to 99 SF. And out of all the data in the scene, it narrowed my search down to one wall. I've created a very specific search for geometry whose node names don't include all the detailed information I was looking up.

Taking a closer look at this set, we can see the highlighted metadata entries do meet all three levels of criteria we searched for. It's got a top offset of negative 4, it-- a base constraint of Level 3, and the area is 99 SF. And by filling in these fields and the-- by typing them in, a Python command automatically was written for me. And that's at the top in the red and white type.

I can save this specific search as a favorite, where the star is, and name it. Then I can go to another editor and load this favorite into it. Here's a movie showing this.

I'll go to the star and save my favorite from the Metadata Editor. And I'll name it Third Floor Wall. And then in the scene graph, it also has the same search function. And I can access what I saved in the metadata here by navigating to where it was saved, which is the Metadata Editor, finding the name of it, which is Third Floor Wall, and then just press Enter to activate the search. And the scene graph nodes from the search are picked. These favorites will be available even after you close and reopen the application.

You can assign color to organize your sets. I'll color-code these narrowed down sets. So to do this, you just hover over a set. And you can see that the cursor turns into a color dropper. And that brings up the color palette.

So I can pick a color. And I can even store it, if I choose to, and then assign a number of sets that same color or choose a new color if I want to, store that one. This makes it easier to see a visual indication of sets with similarities that you define.

And if you forget which kind of search field you're in, just hover over it. And its label will pop up. This first one is Type and Key and Value. To clear a search, use the eraser and the trashcan icons, and the refresh if you change a parameter.

I'll show you one more search example. This time, I want to see if there are any materials, including physical size metadata, in my scene. So this time, I'll save the search and then load it into the Material Editor. But first, like I mentioned, I'll get rid of the current search by clicking on the trashcan and the X's in all the fields I don't need.

I do need the key. So here, I'll type in Physical Size. And here we have two sets that do include physical size metadata. Then I'll save the search, name it, and then I'll jump over to my Material Editor, which also has the search function. And I can load that favorite I just saved. And now it found the two materials which include physical size in my Material Editor.

Deleting geometry doesn't delete its associated metadata. Here, I'm deleting this hospital model. And you can see in the metadata that all its sets remained. So you have to go to Remove All Assignments in order to get rid of this. And this is good to keep in mind to get rid of irrelevant data that you no longer need in your scene.

I'd like to go over a few more concepts to help you understand how to use metadata in VRED. Metadata sets can be saved in the Asset Manager for reuse in other scenes. Let me show you.

I'll drag a set into Assets and back again to show you that the metadata follows it. First, I'll create a new set, rename it Test Set, and I'll add a couple entries. One could be Date and Time. And you can choose any date. And I'll add another entry, which is Boolean, set to True. And I'll just change the key. Are we having fun yet? Next, I'll drag the set into my Assets, delete the existing set in my scene, and drag the set back in from Assets.

So dragging the set from Metadata to Assets and getting rid of the set in my current scene-- and now I drag it back in. And you can see over on the right, even though it's grayed out, that that metadata did come along with it.

So just like any other assets, they need to be modified so that you can edit them. And the set traveled to Assets and back again, retaining the metadata. One thing to keep in mind is this is not saving the associated geometry. It's just saving the metadata entries.

So I've shown you how to add text from another document to your existing metadata. There may be times when you want to edit a long string of existing text without wanting to type it all into a value, a lot of text here in the middle. So I'll demonstrate an easier way to do this.

So on the left here, you can see three colors in the list. This could be approved paint colors. And on the right is a string of color names I want to use to add to and replace the existing list.

I can copy and paste these from a Word document. The viz artist can add these additional approved colors to an existing switch, which contains this hidden information, for an example.

If CMF designers are working in VRED, they can communicate all kinds of material attributes-- not only which colors are approved, but also RGB values and scan texture size, like I showed you with the conversion. All of this can be documented and passed down the pipeline from team to team using metadata. We can access the .json file which stores the metadata and edit it directly.

So looking at this material, the metadata includes a list of three approved paint colors. And I have this text document that has 14 additional colors I want to add to this list. But I don't really feel like typing them all into values.