USD First Steps

Community USD
1

Hello everyone,
I’m new to the OpenUSD world.
I’m a rising Houdini pipeline TD at Ynput where we create an opensource powerful pipeline tool named AYON.

The Call of USD

For some time now I have been curious about USD. So, I started my quest The Call of USD!

I’ve found many resources to learn about USD but I faced some difficulties mostly because of too much details at the same time.
e.g.
I couldn’t understand the foundations of USD because a tutorial is explaining how to use the python API.
or
I couldn’t understand the foundations of USD because a tutorial is explaining a Houdini node that does few things magically.

Hands on Guide

That’s how I came up this guide where it mostly depend on writing raw usda files.
This method helped me to break the dependency of usd fundamentals and its python API/ Houdini nodes.

It started as a summary of several courses that turned into a guide.
This guide is in flavor of Nvidia USD Guides like this one.

Table of contents

Roughly it goes like this:

  1. Some USD Introduction
  2. USD Beginner Guide: it aims to introduce USD concepts without any code, where we read and write raw .usda files. also, we learn about why Composition arc can lead to confusion.
  3. Example USD Asset Structure: I believe this is the first application of USD where we learn about how assets are built. This is also a practical way to learn about why USD is special!. This also, doesn’t contain any python code, just raw .usda snippets. and I believe artists will be able to build their own simple USD assets in raw .usda .
  4. USD API: This is when thing become way cooler where we use python to create the same assets that were built manually in the last example…

You can find it here on my github.
I’ll be more than happy for any feedback. (I hope there are not much errors in it :sweat_smile: )

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