GETTING STARTED WITH USD FOR COLLABORATIVE 3D WORKFLOWS

The Universal Scene Description Framework (OpenUSD), developed by Pixar, was created to develop synergy between technical and creative pioneers, moving from a linear workflow to a collaborative one.

In this self-paced course, participants will embark on a journey to master scene generation using human-readable ASCII Universal Scene Description (.USDA) files. Upon completion, participants will be prepared to create their own scenes within USD, creating a solid foundation for implementation in Omniverse, Maya, Unity, and Unreal Engine.

This training is conducted in two separate sections:

1. An introduction to the basic principles of OpenUSD, with no prior programming requirements.
2. Advanced USD: An introduction to using Python to create USD files, offering an advanced dimension.

The goal of the training is to gain a fundamental understanding of the structure of OpenUSD scenes and gain hands-on experience with OpenUSD Composition Arcs by:

• Overriding an asset’s base properties with Sublayers
• Combining multiple assets with OpenUSD References
• Creating different states of an asset with OpenUSD Variants

Prerequisites:

For introductory content: Basic knowledge of computer graphics concepts such as vertices, grids, and RGB values.

Recommended materials to fulfil prerequisites: Scratchapixel’s Gentle Introduction to Computer Graphics (Programming).

For advanced content: Knowledge of basic Python programming concepts including functions, loops, dictionaries, and arrays.

Recommended materials to fulfil the prerequisite: the official Python 3 textbook.

Tools used:

• Universal Scene Description Framework