USD for Visual Effects

TD Meetup 06: USD for Visual Effects

USD is becoming an important standard file format for visual effects, animation and video game productions. Most of us have heard of USD, but what is it and how to use it in our next production is still a mystery to most.

USD stands for “Universal Scene Description.” It is a system for encoding scalable, hierarchically organized, static and time-sampled data, for the primary purpose of interchanging and augmenting the data between cooperating digital content creation applications.

USD also provides a rich set of composition operators, including asset and file references and variants, that let consumers aggregate multiple assets into a single scenegraph while still allowing for sparse overrides.