Chasing usd_ar.dll issue when attempting SFMBootStrapping

[Bayedan Hales]

Hey team,

prefix that I don't fully understand what I'm talking about.

But I've been trying to use the new Photogrametry and Gaussian pipelines in the nightly builds of Meshroom. I built a version of Alicevision_install with the USD flag enabled to hopefully move past the usd limitation. However, after progressing past the file format issues there seems to be an issue with the usd_ar.dll that occurs right at the end of the SFMBootStrapping node.

After doing some digging with vs 2022, when calling from sfmDataIO -> usd_usd.dll -> usd_sdf.dll -> usd_ar.dll it gets stuck on the 4th _ar call and haults. 

Events manager also confirms this in application errors. 

The photogrametry pipeline also has a similar issue with SFMBootStrapping. So I then tried moddeling the old photogrametry pipeline with USD as the SFM format between the nodes. And had a similar un-logged error when exporting SFM data into a .usda file. This occured at the StructureFromMotion node.

Any help would be greatly appreciated in figuring out how to ensure the SFM nodes manage to write .usda files to the disk for trailing nodes to read.

Unless there is something I have missed when building alicevision with the USD flag on. Would like to get this working for a couple upcoming demonstration projects.

Ulitimate goal is to write out colmap info from an sfm reconstruciton. Have tried in 2025.1.0 with the SFM to JSON and then to Colmap but it wasn't fully functional. 

Will give converting the default SFM format back to .abc or .sfm and see if I can convert to .usda later for the ExportCOLMAP node.

Kindly,

Bayedan