kit-manual: Omniverse Kit Manual
Overview
Omniverse Kit
Omniverse Kit is the SDK for building Omniverse applications like Create and View. It can also be used to develop your own Omniverse applications.
It brings together a few major components:
USD/Hydra (see also omni.usd)
Omniverse (via Omniverse client library)
Carbonite
Omniverse RTX Renderer
Scripting
A UI Toolkit (omni.ui)
As a developer you can use any combination of those to build your own application or just extend or modify what’s already there.
USD/Hydra
USD is the primary Scene Description used by Kit, both for in-memory/authoring/runtime use, and as the serialisation format.
USD can be accessed directly via an external shared library. If your plugin uses USD through C++ it must link to this library. You can also use USD from python using USD’s own python bindings, which cover the whole USD API (but not all of it’s dependencies like Tf, SDF etc). We generated reference documentation for it, see the pxr package.
Hydra allows USD to stream it’s content to any Renderer which has a Hydra Scene Delegate - these include Pixar’s HDStorm (currently shipped with the USD package shipped as part of Kit) as well as the Omniverse RTX Renderer and IRay (both of which ship with Kit)
Omni.USD
Omni.USD (See the omni.usd module for API docs) is an API written in C++ which sits on top of USD, Kit’s core, and the OmniClient library, and provides application-related services such as:
Events/Listeners
Selection handling
Access to the Omniverse USD Audio subsystem
Access to the Omniverse Client Library, and handling of Omniverse Assets/URIs
USD Layer handling
A USDContext which provides convenient access to the main USDStage and its layers, as well as various Hydra, Renderer and Viewport related services
MDL support
Python bindings to all of the above, using the Python-3 async API in most cases
Omniverse Client Library
This is the library that Omniverse clients such as Kit use to communicate with both Omniverse servers and with local filesystems when loading and saving Assets (such as USD, MDL and textures). It contains:
a USD AssetResolver for parsing omniverse:// URIs
some SDF FileFormat plugins to support specialised use cases, including Omniverse’s Live Edit mode
an API to read/write/copy data/files and filesystem-like queries on Omniverse Nucleus servers
Support for managing connections with Omniverse servers
Python bindings to all of the above, using Python-3 async API in most cases
Carbonite
The Carbonite SDK provides the core functionality of all Omniverse apps. This is a C++ based SDK that provides features such as:
Plugin management
Input handling
File access
Persistent settings management
Audio
Asset loading and management
Thread and task management
Image loading
Localization
Synchronization
Basic windowing
All of this is provided with a single platform independent API.
Plugins
Carbonite Plugins are basically shared libraries with C-style interfaces, which can be dynamically loaded and unloaded. Interfaces are semantically versioned and backward compatibility is supported.
Most plugin interfaces have python bindings, i.e they are accessible from python. The pybind11 library is used. For your own plugins you can also write python bindings and make them directly accessible from python.
Omniverse RTX Renderer
As mentioned above, Pixar’s Hydra is used to interface between USD and RTX. This is an area of high architectural complexity, as Kit is required to support a large number of Renderers, multiple custom Scene delegates, multiple Hydra Engines (to support GL, Vulkan, DX12) and a host of other requirements, providing a Viewport inside Kit Applications with Gizmos and other controls, all rendering asynchronously at high frame rates
Scripting
Kit comes with a version of python (currently 3.7) . You can run arbitrary python scripts in Kit based apps which can:
Access all plugins that are exposed via python bindings
Access the USD python API
Access Kit python-only modules
Load and access your C++ Carbonite plugins
Currently there are 3 ways to run scripts:
At app startup time by passing cmd arguments. E.g.:
kit.exe --exec "some_script.py"
Using the Console window
Using the Script Editor Window
Kit Extensions
Building on top of scripting and Carbonite Plugins there is the highest-level and probably most crucial building block: Kit Extensions. You can think of Extensions as versioned packages with a runtime enabled/disabled state. These extensions can depend on other extensions.
omni.ui
Omni.ui, our UI framework, is built on top of Dear Imgui. and written in C++, but exposes only a Python API.