The USD team at Autodesk is proud to announce the release of USD for Maya 0.33 and USD for 3ds Max 0.12.
With USD for Maya 0.33 our installer comes with two versions of USD. This is a split from the norm for us to have multiple versions of USD but we wanted to get some of the new animation spline support that comes with recent versions of USD. This new dual installation is only for Maya 2026 which includes USD 24.11 and USD 25.05. The default is still 24.11. Download this release and see the release notes with instructions on using 25.05 here: Release Version 0.33.0 · Autodesk/maya-usd · GitHub
In USD for 3ds Max 0.12 we added a new feature called Duplicate to USD that mimics the same feature in USD for Maya. This allows you to send objects in your Max scene directly into a stage in your scene. See this new feature in a new learning video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys2qdBVlv5g
Maya USD has always been compiled against the latest current SDK for any given major release. This means that during the active major release cycle, each new release comes out against that major release’s latest versions/SDK. Unfortunately, this means that the builds are only guaranteed to work with the latest update for this release (in this case, Maya 2026.2).
For our builds for previous releases, we always build against the last update that was released for that version.
Thanks for your input. We do intend to add support for material binding in a loaded stage as well as adding the ability to load payloads. In terms of overrides, this is already currently possible by simply targeting the correct layer in the USD Layer Editor, unless you are talking about something else.
I was referring to creating material overrides and variant sets.
material bind
material override
variant set
payload
I don’t understand why so much attention is given to things that are smaller than these, things that are essential for Max to compete side-by-side with other software.