Extra Ordinary, the Series

There was a recent Omniverse Discord thread that had some great links to videos by @Simplychenable. I am capturing the videos here for later reference.

The following video on “Building Asset Pipelines” is my favorite at the moment. There is a lot of introductory content on OpenUSD. What is a prim? What is a prim path? What is a property? What is a schema? There are also lots of great showy demonstrations of end results. This video goes to the next step, more depth without going over the top. It is somewhat old, but it’s still a great introduction to how Pixar leverages OpenUSD for tackling harder problems. It hits a lot of concepts pretty quickly.

The following video goes through giving examples of references, payloads, layers, deltas, and variants. These are the most commonly used building blocks of OpenUSD, and the video goes through describing when to use the different options.

Another video, focusing on layers.

Another series on the basics for assembling scenes.

This one shows assembling buildings but using more of the OpenUSD Python API to achieve it: https://jonnhyrdg.github.io

Some more videos from Pixar, on real-time graphics in Pixar film production and another USD pipeline video (like the one at the top of the page).

Aaron Luk has a video series on OpenUSD, who was at Pixar, is now one of many guys behind the implementation of OpenUSD for OV. They also have a learning path.

Another asset structure video, this one talking about the great DaVinci demo (which is now available for download!)

There are some videos on Variants. Variants are an interesting one to me because you can use layers to achieve something similar, but they can help so it’s good to know about them.

Simplychenable went on to say “there is not a single way to structure OpenUSD projects”, which I agree with. The power of OpenUSD is more that it is flexible and extensible. It has useful features that allow you to build assets in a way that meets the needs of your organization. You should not look at other pipelines and expect to copy them directly. You should look at other pipelines to see what problems they solved and how, then decide if that is a problem in your circumstances.

There is more discussion in the Omniverse Discord thread, so I actually suggest you go and read it there. But this thread had so many useful resources linked to it (thanks Simplychenable!) that I wanted to capture them here for prosperity.