Layer
A Layer is a collection of Prims and their Properties that can be saved to/loaded from disk or memory. As such, it can be considered a “saveable hierarchy”.
Standard USD Layers can be represented on-disk via
| Extension | Description |
|---|---|
.usda | ASCII Text, human-readable format |
.usdc | USD Crate file format. High performance binary not human-readable format |
.usd | either Crate or Text |
.usdz | uncompressed and packaged format (.zip) |
USD allows for extending what you can load as a “Layer” via a special kind of plugin (SdfFileFormat). In fact, the file types listed above are actually all plugins of this type.
Using this SdfFileFormat plugin type, it is for example possible to also support loading .fbx, .abc, .obj (or anything really) in Usd.