Hi all,
Not sure if this would be a useful workflow, but I’ve opensourced a FileFormat plugin I wrote a while back to be able to load USD data from PNG metadata.
The idea is that, after a render, you can snapshot the USD stage directly in the rendered PNG (or EXR if you want to extend it), so that you can load the USD file directly from the PNG itself, using it as if it is a USD file (hence, a FileFormat for *.png files).
It may not be the most useful thing ever, as in various custom pipelines you could achieve this in various other ways, plus, you have the other way around, with the “preview” metadata in USD to store the render.
But in case it is useful to anyone, it’s here:
And here is a video of it in action: