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USD Validation#

Asset Validator is a Kit extension used to ensure the integrity and functionality of any digital twin asset through USD standard validators. The extension also allows you to extend the framework with your own custom rules.

Validation as Quality Contract#

Validation transforms asset creation from one-off manual work into repeatable, automatable pipelines that scale from pilot projects to production facilities.

At pilot scale, teams can succeed with manual fixes and tribal knowledge. At platform scale—with multiple tools, suppliers, continuous updates, and operational telemetry—unstructured data becomes ungovernable. Validation for correctness, structure, and content makes data:

  • Inspectable: Teams can reason about asset quality without opening every file.

  • Mergeable: Updates from multiple sources don’t break downstream consumers.

  • Automatable: Quality gates execute repeatably without per-asset manual intervention.

Benefits of validation throughout your creation process:

  • Improved Quality Assurance: Automatically detect and fix issues in assets, ensuring they meet the required standards.

  • Time Efficiency: Save time by quickly identifying problems that can be difficult and time consuming to find manually.

  • Interoperability Contract Fulfillment: Validating assets for correctness (valid USD, proper geometry), structure (proper hierarchy, composition patterns), and content (appropriate metadata, properties) helps fulfill the technical contracts needed for assets to work reliably across CAE tools, simulators, and operations systems. Multiple physics domains (thermal, electrical, structural) can reference validated models with greater confidence.

  • Consistency: Maintain a consistent quality across all assets, leading to a more polished final product and enabling suppliers, ISVs, and internal teams to contribute while maintaining compatibility.

  • Error Reduction: Minimize the risk of errors that could cause performance issues or visual defects in the runtime environment.

Validation establishes measurable quality criteria that support—but don’t guarantee—interoperability across the ecosystem. Assets must meet validation contracts as a foundation for reliable integration.

Which Validators Should I Implement?#

For visualizing geometry in a Kit application, a number of validators have been identified for your consideration:

  • Stage Units

  • Component Encapsulation / Atomic Assets

  • Geometry

  • Materials

Further reading

Hands On#

The output from the latest JT converter with these JT files has no geometry issues. Let’s introduce some geometry issues, then go through how to address the geometry issues and implement a strategy to eliminate them on conversion.

  1. Make sure that no USD files are open in USD Composer (File -> New).

  2. Overwrite the files in the {your_chosen_path}/Assets/Wheel/Parts directory with the files in the {your_unzip_location}/vfi_workflow_data/GeoIssues folder.

  3. Open USD Composer and go to Window -> Utilities -> Asset Validator.

  4. On the top left dropdown, change the input from Stage to Uri and paste the folder path to the parts directory into the field to the right of Uri.

  5. Click Enable All.

  6. Click Analyze.

Asset Validator GUI

If the color of the file turns yellow or red, it means that we have some warning or error issues with one of the validator checkers. Toggle the tree to see what rules failed. These files have some geometry issues that are getting flagged by the Asset Validator. If you remember in the workflow iteration cycle above, there are three paths you can take when you encounter asset validation issues:

  • Fix the source data in CAD (and re-convert).

  • Fix data output in your connector (and re-convert).

  • Use Scene Optimizer to try to fix the issue after conversion.

Next, let’s use the scene optimizer to fix the geometry issues that we saw above.