New Video Series: What Developers Need to Know About Universal Scene Description

NVIDIA has released a video series aimed at helping developers get started using Universal Scene Description (USD) to build tools for virtual worlds. USD, invented by Pixar Animation Studios, is an open and extensible framework for creating, editing, querying, rendering, collaborating, and simulating within 3D worlds.

Four Key Features of USD

The first episode of the series highlights four key features of USD that make it the ideal tool for data modeling and interchange:

1. Composition and layering: This enables non-destructive assembly of data from multiple different sources as individual layers, allowing various users to make changes to the composed scene in different layers while keeping data accessible.

2. Custom schemas: USD schemas go beyond geometry and shading. NVIDIA collaborated with Pixar and Apple to create physics schemas for rigid bodies and continues to prototype new schemas to expand the ecosystem and standards for virtually immersive environments.

3. Dynamic data science pipelines: The Hydra pipeline processes composed scene graphs and runtimes. It's not tightly coupled to any single runtime data layout, enabling flexibility for implementing business logic to process data as a customizable chain of runtime scene indexes.

4. Plug-in system for asset resolvers: This allows for integrating USD with asset management tools and file formats like Alembic and OBJ.

More Resources

For more information and access to more resources, visit the USD website. The Omniverse forum is also a great place for community discussion about USD. Developers can find resources to get started on the NVIDIA website, including forums, a Discord server, and Twitch and YouTube channels.