Universal Scene Description, also called OpenUSD or USD, is an open and extensible framework for creating, editing, querying, rendering, collaborating, and simulating within 3D worlds. Invented by Pixar Animation Studios, USD is much more than a file format. It is an ecosystem and interchange paradigm that models, labels, classifies, and combines a wide range of data sources into a composed ground truth.
With the increasing adoption of USD in various industries ranging from manufacturing and robotics to retail and architecture, the framework’s scalability and interoperability enable professionals to efficiently create high-fidelity and true-to-life simulations of the real world with collaborative and non-destructive authoring.
To help more developers get started leveraging USD to build tools for virtual worlds, NVIDIA is releasing an exclusive OpenUSD for Developers video series that delivers a foundational understanding of what many have called the HTML of the 3D internet. With NVIDIA Omniverse, developers can easily integrate OpenUSD into existing software tools, simulation workflows, and generative AI-based applications.
Composition and layering
The OpenUSD Composition engine enables sparse, nondestructive assembly of data from multiple different sources as individual layers. In other words, various users can make changes to the composed scene in different layers, but their edits are nondestructive and the data from all layers remains accessible.
Custom schemas
USD schemas do not end at geometry and shading. NVIDIA collaborated with Pixar and Apple to also create physics schemas for rigid bodies and continues to prototype new schemas to further expand the ecosystem and standards for virtually immersive environments.
Connecting any data source
USD data storage is not anchored to any filesystem or nonvolatile storage and can even be procedurally generated. This is made possible by the USD plug-in system for asset resolvers such as NVIDIA Omniverse Nucleus and file formats like Alembic and OBJ.
Dynamic data science pipelines
The fourth key feature of USD, Hydra, has evolved into a generalized pipeline for processing composed scene graphs and runtimes. The keyword for Hydra is flexibility as it’s not tightly coupled to any single runtime data layout. This enables Omniverse to compile the composed USD into a deeply vectorized data layout called Fabric. Hydra provides interfaces for implementing the business logic to process data as a customizable chain of runtime scene indexes.
For more information about the latest advancements and to access more resources, see Universal Scene Description. For community discussion about USD, see the latest USD topics on the Omniverse forum.
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