Siggraph Presentation

This guide will be officially introduced at Siggraph 2023 - Houdini Hive on Wednesday, 9. of August 2023 at 11:00 AM PST.

Motivation

As USD has been consistently increasing its market share in the recent years, it is definitely a technology to be aware of when working in any industry that uses 3d related data. It is becoming the de facto standard format on how different applications and vendors exchange their data.

You might be thinking:

Oh no another guide! Do we really need this?

This guide aims to solve the following 'niche':

  • It aims to be an onboarding guide for software developers & pipeline developers so that you can hit the ground running.
  • It aims to be practical as opposed to offering a high-level overview. This means you'll find a lot of code examples from actual production scenarios as well as a more hands on approach instead of overviews/terminology explanations. We'll often link to resources you can look into before a certain section to have a better understanding should vocabulary issues arise.
  • It aims to soften the steep learning curve that some aspects of USD have by having a look at common production examples so you can have those sweet "aha, that's how it works" moments.

Basically think of it as a balance of links listed in the below resources section.

Tip

If this is your first time working with Usd, we recommend watching this 20 minute video from Apple:

Understand USD fundamentals (Frm WWDC 2022)

It covers the basic terminology in a very succinct manner.

Resources

We highly recommend also checking out the following resources:

A big thank you to the VFX community!

At this point of the guide, we just want to state, that we didn't re-invent the wheel here: A big thank you to all the (open-source) projects/tutorials/guides that cover different aspects of Usd. You have been a big help in designing this guide as well as giving great insights. There is no one-to-rule them all documentation, so please consider contributing back to these projects if possible!

Contributing and Acknowledgements

Please consider contributing back to the Usd project in the official Usd Repository and via the Usd User groups.

Feel free to fork this repository and share further examples/improvements. If you run into issues, please flag them by submitting a ticket.

Contributors