Universal Scene Description
Universal Scene Description (USD) is an efficient, scalable system for
authoring, reading, and streaming time-sampled scene description for
interchange between graphics applications.
For more details, please visit the web site here.
Build Status
------------, master, dev, -----, ------, ---, Linux/macOS, 
, 
, Additional Documentation
Getting Help
Need help understanding certain concepts in USD? See
Getting Help with USD or
visit our forum.
If you are experiencing undocumented problems with the software, please
file a bug.
Supported Platforms
USD is currently supported on Linux platforms and has been built and tested
on CentOS 7 and RHEL 7.
We are actively working on porting USD to both Windows and Mac platforms.
Support for both platforms should be considered experimental at this time.
Currently, the tree will build on Mac and Windows, but only limited testing
has been done on these platforms.
Dependencies
The following dependencies are required:
The following dependencies are optional:
See 3rd Party Library and Application Versions for version information.
Additional dependencies are required for the following components. These
components may be disabled at build-time, for further details see
Advanced Build Configuration.
Imaging and USD Imaging
The following dependencies are required:
The following dependencies are optional:
usdview
The following dependencies are required:
Getting and Building the Code
The simplest way to build USD is to run the supplied build_usd.py
script. This script will download required dependencies and build
and install them along with USD in a given directory.
Follow the instructions below to run the script with its default behavior,
which will build the USD core libraries, Imaging, and USD Imaging components.
For more options and documentation, run the script with the --help
parameter.
See Advanced Build Configuration for examples and
additional documentation for running cmake directly.
1. Install prerequisites (see Dependencies for required versions)
- Required:
- C++ compiler:
- gcc
- Xcode
- Microsoft Visual Studio
- NASM (required for Imaging on Windows)
- CMake
- C++ compiler:
- Optional (Can be ignored by passing
--no-pythonas an argument tobuild_usd.py)- Python (required for bindings and tests)
- PyOpenGL (required for usdview)
- PySide or PySide2 (experimental) (required for usdview)
2. Download the USD source code
You can download source code archives from GitHub or use git to clone the repository.
> git clone https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/USD
Cloning into 'USD'...
3. Run the script
Linux:
For example, the following will download, build, and install USD's dependencies,
then build and install USD into /usr/local/USD.
> python USD/build_scripts/build_usd.py /usr/local/USD
MacOS:
In a terminal, run xcode-select to ensure command line developer tools are
installed. Then run the script.
For example, the following will download, build, and install USD's dependencies,
then build and install USD into /opt/local/USD.
> python USD/build_scripts/build_usd.py /opt/local/USD
Windows:
Launch the "Developer Command Prompt" for your version of Visual Studio and
run the script in the opened shell. Make sure to use the 64-bit (x64) command
prompt and not the 32-bit (x86) command prompt. (Note if you're trying to
build with Visual Studio 2017, use the "x86 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS
2017").
See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/tools/developer-command-prompt-for-vs for more details.
For example, the following will download, build, and install USD's dependencies,
then build and install USD into C:\Program Files\USD.
C:\> python USD\build_scripts\build_usd.py "C:\Program Files\USD"
4. Try it out
Set the environment variables specified by the script when it finishes and
launch usdview with a sample asset.
> usdview extras/usd/tutorials/convertingLayerFormats/Sphere.usda
Contributing
If you'd like to contribute to USD (and we appreciate the help!), please see
the Contributing page in the
documentation for more information.