Audience
Animators, visual effects artists, and game developers in search of a solution to create animated 3D scenes
About Universal Scene Description
Universal Scene Description (USD) is an open source framework developed by Pixar Animation Studios for the interchange of 3D graphics data across various digital content creation tools. USD provides a rich and powerful toolset for reading, writing, editing, and rapidly previewing 3D scene data. With many of its features geared towards performance and large-scale collaboration among many artists, USD is ideal for the complexities of the modern pipeline. One such feature is Hydra, a high-performance preview renderer capable of interactively displaying large data sets. USD supports a variety of file formats, including usda, usdc, and usdz (a zero-compression, unencrypted zip archive), facilitating flexibility in data representation and exchange. The framework also includes tools like usdedit, a script that converts any single USD-readable file into its .usda text equivalent for easy editing.