Models, Materials and USD

USD

The fundamental representation for assets in Omniverse is Pixar’s open-source Universal Scene Description (USD). While USD includes a file format, it is much more than that. USD is a powerful scene representation with an API that allows complex property inheritance, instancing, layering, lazy loading and a wide variety of other key features. Omniverse uses USD for interchange through the Nucleus DB service.

Additional and Recommended Source of USD Information

What Makes USD Unique

5 Things To Know About USD

Extending USD

Universal Scene Description is also extensible to support new data models and workflows. This is primarily done using USD schemas. NVIDIA has developed custom USD schemas to represent general physical properties of objects (e.g. mass, moment of inertia), the way they are constrained to move (e.g. pivots, joints) and parameters specific to a particular Physics simulator (e.g. NVIDIA’s open-source PhysX).

For more information on custom schemas, please see our USD Schemas documentation

Interested in learning more?

Open the Omniverse USD documentation portal