Why OpenUSD matters

Many asks why should I care about an USD pipeline? Will it benefit me as a freelancer or small studio?
The answer is most likely yes, and for several reasons!

Open USD, or Universal Scene Description, is here to stay. The easiest way to think about it is exactly what the name sounds like. It's an open formats to exchange data between different 3D software packages, but it's also so much more. While I am not going to go heavily in-depth here, I'll glance over a few benefits.

Being an early-adopter is never the path of least resistance. There are challenges, but I believe USD solves more than it creates. So what does it do?

Well, both as a freelancer and running a small studio, it has helped a lot. Think of it as Lego blocks. You prep an asset. Then you create a second asset that merges a few assets together. And then you populate your scene with this. You end up with 4-5 scenes, and then the client has feedback on the asset. Now you have one location to fix this. You can version up your asset, and there's no need to go into each individual scene and make edits. It all populates down.

You have built-in proxy support. Are you building a huge scene. A forest? Those trees will bog down your computer and viewport real fast! Luckily, with USD you can save a super low poly version of the tree and it'll seamlessly switch to the high quality render asset on render. Do you need to see the high quality version in the viewport? Ok, just toggle the render/proxy switch.

An asset can also have variants. So you can have a light pole with light on or off in the same asset. Switch or randomize easily in your scene. Or you can have different light pole types, different texture sets and so on. So from one file and one asset, you can change things up very easily. You can also use variants as built-in LODs. Ensure high quality models are closer to the camera, while lower resolution models are further back. Even with today's powerful computers, scene optimization is important!

You can support multiple render engines in one asset. You can assign a Karma, a Redshift, an Arnold shaders etc. all on the same asset. USD is smart enough to seamlessly switch between them, and no need for the artist to figure this out.

USD works as a layer and opinion system, which also is so powerful. While I won't go in-depth in this post, think of it as layering edits non-destructively. An example is you can load a static tree, then have the animation as a separate USD and layer it on top. Depending on your setup, you might be able to use the animation on another object all-together, if the hierarchy matches up.

And lastly, circling back to the most common conception. It's easy to export and import models, animation, cameras, lights, materials (to a degree) between software packages. Ensuring you can use the best talent and their preferred software, and it'll still work with your pipeline.