Motivation

Universal Scene Description (USD) is already making big waves in the VFX/Film and Games industries, with large players such as NVidia, Apple and Autodesk jumping on the technology. But as a newcomer; it can be an incredibly daunting and frustrating journey to venture into.

This book’s driving motivation is to offer a succinct, beginner-friendly and structured way of introducing USD, its concepts and terminology. At the moment this book focusses predominantly on terminology, but will be expanded upon with workflow examples in the future.

You may be wondering at this point

Why read this book instead the official USD Glossary and Tutorials?

Jumping head-first into the official USD Glossary or Tutorials is a perfectly valid strategy; unfortunately, the reality is that USD is a very complex machine with many moving parts intertwined with one another. Simply trying out USD’s bundled applications like USDView can be quite involved if you’re not a software engineer.
Many concepts are also tied to the hip, as such it can be very easy to drown in terminology. This kind of “rabbit-hole-diving” method of learning can be incredibly confusing and overwhelming.

This book offers an alternative path to that.

Author’s Note

At Remedy Entertainment, we absolutely ❤ USD! We even gave a talk about how we are using it to make AAA games!

After the aforementioned presentation, we were asked to release our internal documentation on USD itself publicly as we had written a more simplified subset of the official USD Glossary. This book is that documentation, albeit cleaned up, rewritten and adjusted for mdbook compatibility.

We are releasing this with a permissive license, so you are free to fork/copy/change your version of this book as you see fit.