Over the past few months, I’ve written an onboarding guide to OpenUSD for pipeline TDs and software developers under the name “USD Survival Guide”. I wanted to create something that softens the often steep learning curve that some aspects of USD have.
It aims to be practical as opposed to offering a high-level overview. This means, you’ll find a lot of code examples from actual production scenarios as well as a more hands on approach instead of overviews/terminology explanations.
It is also intended to be used by small to mid-size (25-150 people) studios, which often don’t have the development resources to figure everything out themselves, to transition to USD more easily. Therefore, it ships with asset resolver example implementations, general best practice tips & tricks and a pre-flight checklist to see if you are ready to make the switch to USD. We also primarily stick to the Python side of things (at least for now, I’m hoping to expand this to C++ in the future).
It uses Houdini to explain all the basic concepts of USD as well as features a deep dive best practice section for Houdini Solaris, which I’ll be presenting as part of Houdini’s Siggraph 2023 Hive on Wednesday, 9.8.23. If you’re in town, I’d love to see you there, hear your feedback and have a chat!
Keep in mind that this is the first draft, so there might be some mistakes here and there. I feel like it is already in a good enough shape though to be released. It is open-source, so please feel free to contribute
Yes, SideFX will put it on the usual social media channels afterwards
The presentation will be a summarized version of the most import stuff (and more Houdini focused, as it is part of the Houdini Hive presentations). Would be very cool to see you there, but if you can’t make it, don’t worry! The guide itself goes into a lot more detail, so you won’t be missing out that much, content wise.
Thanks @LucaScheller for such a great resource for the community, and for any of you who didn’t manage to make it to see his presentation at siggraph, the video link to the SideFX Hive session is here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSE7ayrRStg
This means you can now just download the binaries here on our release page: