OpenUSD | USD Survival Guide | A Practical Onboarding Guide for Pipeline TDs & Software Developers

LucaScheller VFX November 13, 2023 | 0

Hi everyone,

Over the past few months, I’ve written an onboarding guide to OpenUSD for pipeline TDs and software developers under the name “USD Survival Guide”. I wanted to create something that softens the often steep learning curve that some aspects of USD have.

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.

It is also intended to be used by small to mid-size (25-150 people) studios, which often don’t have the development resources to figure everything out themselves, to transition to USD more easily. Therefore, it ships with asset resolver example implementations, general best practice tips & tricks and a pre-flight checklist to see if you are ready to make the switch to USD. We also primarily stick to the Python side of things (at least for now, I’m hoping to expand this to C++ in the future).

It uses Houdini to explain all the basic concepts of USD as well as features a deep dive best practice section for Houdini Solaris, which I was very honoured to present as part of Houdini’s Siggraph 2023 Hive on the 9.8.23.

It is open-source, so please feel free to contribute