Pixar Universal Scene Description (USD)
What Is Universal Scene Description?
Universal Scene Description (USD) is an easily extensible, open-source 3D scene description and file format developed by Pixar for content creation and interchange among different tools. As a result of its power and versatility, it’s being widely adopted, not only in the visual effects community, but also in architecture, design, robotics, manufacturing, and other disciplines.
USD at NVIDIA
USD is the foundation for NVIDIA Omniverse™, a live collaborative platform that connects a wide variety of content creation tools to each other and to our real-time NVIDIA RTX™ ray tracer. Learn more about NVIDIA Omniverse and sign up for updates here.
NVIDIA has expanded upon USD by developing new tools, integrating technologies and providing samples and tutorials.
USD Pre-built Libraries and Tools
The USD libraries are only available in source form from Pixar, and building USD can be quite an adventure. We’re offering pre-built libraries as well as the accompanying tools (e.g., USDView) for download. This package will help you get started developing tools that take advantage of USD or get you up and running with USDView right away.
Activision USD Shell Extension
Activision has released a powerful Windows Shell Extension for the Pixar USD file format. It adds a Hydra realtime preview, thumbnail support, context menus and metadata properties in Windows Explorer as well as metadata search in Windows Search
USD 21.02, Python 3.6 for Linux
USD 20.11, Python 3.6 for Windows
USD 20.11, Python 3.6 for Linux
USD 20.11, Python 2.7 for Windows
USD 20.11, Python 2.7 for Linux
USD 20.08, Python 3.6 for Windows
USD 20.08, Python 3.6 for Linux
USD 20.08, Python 2.7 for Windows
USD 20.08, Python 2.7 for Linux
USD 20.05, Python 3.6 for Windows
USD 20.05, Python 3.6 for Linux
USD 20.05, Python 3.7 for OSX
USD 20.05, Python 2.7 for Windows
USD 20.05, Python 2.7 for Linux
USD 20.05, Python 2.7 for OSX
Tutorials
- 00:00 - Platform Overview
- 01:25 - Technology Stack
- 03:17 - Video Tutorials
- 03:38 - Kit Extension System
- 05:16 - Extension Manager
- 05:30 - Simplest Extension
- 05:50 - Extension Dependencies
- 06:31 - Kit Application
- 06:57 - Python Extension
- 07:21 - Kit SDK Samples
- 08:36 - Omni.UI
- 09:32 - Omni.UI Documentation
- 10:23 - Omni.UI Dynamic Syntax
- 11:54 - Omni.UI Graph Framework
- 12:26 - Model-View-Controller Pattern
- 13:04 - Full Model API
- 13:18 - Example Application
- 14:01 - Important APIs - Treeview Widget
- 15:24 - Important APIs - The Web in Kit
- 16:24 - Important APIs - Web Streaming
- 17:50 - Nucleus-Based Microservices
- 18:42 - Kit-Based Microservices
- 19:01 - Omni.kit.controlport
- 19:36 - Kit Microservices with Rendering
- 20:00 - Technology Preview - Quick Search
- 22:02 - Technology Preview - Omni.UI Inspector
- 24:00 - Omniverse Kit Recap
Now that you have had a good overview of the platform and its components we suggest you take some time to learn about USD which is at the center of Omniverse.
Getting Started with USD for Collaborative 3D Workflows
In this self-paced course, participants will learn how to generate a scene using human-readable Universal Scene Description ASCII (.USDA) files. Upon completion, participants will be able to create their own scenes within the USD framework and will have a strong foundation to use it in applications such as Omniverse, Maya, Unity, and Unreal Engine.
There are two sections to this training:
- USD Fundamentals: An introduction to the basics of USD, no programming knowledge required.
- Advanced USD: A demonstration of how to use Python to generate USD files.
Try the course
USD Sample Assets
- Download NVIDIA Omniverse Open Beta
- Learn how to install Omniverse and the marbles sample scene

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Download
You will need to review and accept Pixar’s license agreement before downloading the file.
Download from PIXAR
The USD ALab data set is the Animal Logic interpretation and implementation of real world production and pipeline concepts. There are two downloads available, including guiding documents and two sets of textures.
Read Me Download from Animal Logic
Material Definition Language (MDL) Schema
USD is agnostic about the way material properties are represented. At NVIDIA, we believe artists should be able to author materials for cinema-quality rendering and have an automated process that produces simpler but still high-quality shaders in real time.
To achieve this, NVIDIA has developed MDL, an open-source, GPU-friendly Material Definition Language with an associated distiller that simplifies shaders for preview and virtual reality (VR) applications. The NVIDIA MDL SDK has been adopted by many application developers, including Adobe®, Allegorithmic, and Epic’s Unreal Studio.
To facilitate its use, we’ve created a specification (MDL Schema) for referencing MDL in USD and have developed Omniverse plug-ins to facilitate MDL-based workflows. MDL enjoys wide and increasing adoption in the design, visual effects, and gaming industries, among others.

USD Physics
Additional Resources
USD and Hydra Resources
- Pixar's USD
- USD training content on NVIDIA On-Demand
- NVIDIA Omniverse
- NVIDIA Omniverse Developer Platform
- NVIDIA MDL
- NVIDIA MDL SDK
- NVIDIA MDL SDK Documentation (Online)
- USD Python API notes page
- USD Tutorials page