OpenUSD Overview

Welcome to the ever expanding community of developers and users in the OpenUSD ecosystem!

Computer graphics and simulations for films, games, industrial engineering, and scientific experimentation involve heavy amounts of 3D data. Each application in the pipeline, from modeling, shading, animation, lighting, physics and particle effects to rendering, has its own unique way of representing the scene, optimized for specific requirements and workflows. This “scene description” is created, serialized, and travels across many data pipelines. Traditionally, these representations cannot be natively understood or modified by downstream runtimes, creating silos of data trapped in the host application.

The need arose for scalable interchange to handle massive amounts of data efficiently while being open enough to encompass all sorts of scene data. Following the first open-source release of OpenUSD by Pixar in 2016, its adoption has steadily grown across industries scaling up for 3D content pipelines everywhere.

The videos below are a friendly introduction to the key features of OpenUSD that unlock countless possibilities for assembling, simulating, and collaborating in virtual worlds.

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