Today we released a range of updates in our products around USD. We are excited to share these updates across Maya and 3ds Max.
USD for Maya 0.30
One of our focuses has been to improve lighting and rendering workflows. One key highlight around this is the ability to control USD cameras in the viewport when looking though them using native Maya viewport controls. For lights we have added viewport shapes that allow you to select the lights in the viewport. This will improve setting up camera and lights as we see this as an important area for continued improvements and focus.
We’ve also improved USD interaction in the Outliner with two new features: Reloading References and Outliner Text Color for USD prims. With the reload references, you can force USD to fetch the latest updates to any files referenced on selected prims. To display USD Prim text colors in the Outliner, we added a new Object Display option in the Outliner that allows you to set the color for a prim.
In the exporter we added support to export a Maya scene containing a USD Proxy Shape to include that USD Proxy Shape in the export as an Xform prim with a reference to the root layer file.
Note that the camera and light improvements and some other new features require Maya 2025.3+ as they required changes not only to our USD plugin but to Maya itself.
For a complete list of new features and changes please see Maya Help | USD for Maya v0.30.0 Release Notes | Autodesk
You can also find updates on Arnold and Bifrost that include improvements for USD.
USD for 3ds Max 0.9
The highlight of the latest USD update for 3ds Max is a USD Property Editor available in the modify tab when selecting a prim in a USD Stage. This will allow you to make changes to prim properties. This feature is exposed when you switch to a USDStageObejct’s prim sub-object level.
We also added a new Snaps category for USD that allows snapping to Faces, Edges and Vertices.
Another key feature is a feature that will automatically generate Draw Modes for Pointinstancers to improve performance on scenes using pointinstances.
Finally, we added support for importing USD Curves into Max.
For the complete list of features and changes in Max, see 3ds Max 2025 Help | USD for 3ds Max 0.9 Release Notes | Autodesk .
We hope these improvements help you work more efficiently and improve your USD workflows. As always, feel free to reach out to us with any thoughts, ideas and concerns.