Lighting and usdview, usdrecord discrepancies

Community Hydra
1

I have a scene with a RectLight and three SphereLights. I tweaked the lights so that it looks good in usdview. Now I observe the following:

  • If I switch to a camera defined in the scene (say “OverheadCam”), the scene looks completely blown out, as if the light intensities are far too high. If I then attempt to zoom in or out, even by a tiny bit, the scene redraws and looks correct.
  • usdrecord (with camera lights disabled) always records images with the blown-out lighting.

I’m on MacOS Sequoia, and this is a “factory” build of OpenUSD 25.11.

2

To add some more info: the problem appears to be related to a transformation that we’re applying in the scene to the geometry. We’re converting all the referenced geometry from Z-up/meters to Y-up/cm. The lights are defined outside this transformation.