USD for Maya and Max Updates

Community USD
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The USD Team at Autodesk is happy to announce the releases of USD for Maya 0.32 and USD for 3ds Max 0.11. USD for Maya 0.32 comes bundled with Maya 2026.1 and is now available on Github . USD for Max 0.11 is bundled with 3ds Max 2026.1 and will be available on Github soon as well.

USD for Maya Key Highlights

Animation Curves: This is the first update to include any support for USD Animation curves and is available for Maya 2026+ as they are a new feature of USD requiring versions of Maya supporting USD 24.11+. The current implementation only covers the export of animation curves for float properties in cameras. While this is a limited scope, it allows you to start testing workflows of using true animation curves in a USD pipeline.

Anim curve support will continue to be a focus of support as the team works to fill out the exporter and importer to work with USD anim curves.

You can test this new capability in the Animation rollout of the USD Exporter and choose Animation Curves from the new Type dropdown.

MaterialX Document: We have added support for exporting a MaterialX document into the USD data when exporting geometry that has a MaterialX document from the MaterialX stack bound to it. This will help faciliate those transitioning from using Hypershade to LookDevX in their workflows.

Other improvements include updates to improve gizmos of USD lights to respect USD attributes, improvements with the USD Collection Widget and new functions to get/set selected layers in the USD Layer Editor. See the release notes for more info.

USD for Max Key Highlights

Promote to 3ds Max Object: This new feature brings Max and USD closer together by allowing a user to send branches of a USD scene directly into a Max geometry object that has a live connection to the underlying USD data. This allows you to selectively bring USD prims into Max to use with native tools such as the modifier stack or 3rd-party tools like Tyflow or ForestPack.

OpenPBR Export: The exporter now supports the OpenPBR Material that is part of recent versions of 3ds Max.

Other improvements include a new export option to place top hierarchy objects in world space, improvements to the USD Collection widget and new functions to get/set selected layers in the USD Layer Editor. See the release notes for more info.

The team is happy to share these improvements and looks forward to your feedback.

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Could you elaborate further on this?

Is it exporting a .mtlx file along side the usd or is it exporting the MaterialX nodegraph into a usd shade graph?

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At this time it’s being exported directly into a USD shade graph. We have discussed adding an option to also export to separate MaterialX files and referencing in, but we would need to add extra options into the exporter that will control where the MaterialX documents get written to since, at this time, the MaterialX Stack doesn’t maintain a reference to MaterialX documents on disk. The current plan of the MaterialX stack is to allow references, so we will add an option to maintain that reference at the point in time that becomes available.

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Ah okay, yeah that makes sense. I was just confused by the wording, but what you’re doing (usd shade graph) is our preference anyway.

Thanks for the clarification and another solid update! I’ll have to get our pipeline on this asap. Looking forward to it

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The USD for 3ds Max 0.11 is now available on Github as well.

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