Animal Logic opensourced there USD plugin for maya…
http://www.animallogic.com/News/Current-News/USDMAYA
now there are three USD plugs for maya… i fear we get even more in the future…
http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html
and materialX is also coming into play…
http://www.materialx.org/
will it get even more complex to work with or will it help smaller studios as well…?
is it available for download? did anyone compiled for actual maya ver?
im really tired of opensources and compiling things, i dont know how an artists can compile the source code? i have to install 22 apps to make a plugin of 20kb size, come on people…
i was addressing to USD 
p.s.
i saw the video but most of the people r still using maya 16 etc… and i guess the usd will be implemented into maya 2020… 
the USD plugin from the froundry is working with maya2015… so if you like to work with thats no excuse…
What? Really? Can you post the link, i was looking everywhere for binary files but couldnt find anything
thx
the fileformat is open source yes… but the tools around not… at least multiverse…
its like vray for blender…
And as always with much open source tools, if you manage to compile the original plugin from pixar, it is free…
Has anyone here used USD in a midsized company?
I’m a bit put off by its complexity. We use python dicts stored in jsons to transfer scene layouts across departments which works rather fine with only 1 or 2 thousand lines of python code around it. No need for c plugins with custom draw shapes that don’t work with Mayas latest openGl technique.
Nico
Indeed an interesting question. The layering approach is quite nice, but the whole system seems complicated. I ask myself how it works togehter with Maya’s referencing system.
I hope not … from my experience scene assembly is even more fragile than file referencing and doesn’t support some of the useful stuff like shader overrides if I remember correctly. I tried it once here on a project and will probably never use again. It also seems dead in Autodesks development.
there is an article about the USD plugin from AnimalLogic…
https://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/open-source-release-of-usdmaya-plugin-al_usdmaya-by-animal-logic/
and some slides of the materialX presentation at siggraph…
http://www.materialx.org/assets/MaterialX%20Sig2017%20BOF%20Slides.pdf
the shaderX whitepaper is now online…
https://github.com/autodesk-forks/MaterialX/blob/adsk_contrib/shaderx/documents/Specification/ShaderX.Draft.pdf
more infos on the materialX google group…
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/materialx/ZHXl-B68Dt0
ShaderX? Isn’t that what osl was supposed to do?
Fun fact too is that USD will not support MaterialX but has its own USDshade.
This reminds me of this:
https://xkcd.com/927/
nope materiaX, shaderX and lookdevX are using OSL or other shading languages to send the final data to the render…
its more for managing shaders, textures and lights in the scene… its a shading creation network that does work across diffrent DCC aps…
USD will support both…
[quote=]we’re hoping that we’re getting this out there early enough that DCC’s will consider authoring (or converting) directly to USD if they want to export shading, whether it be mtlx-compliant or not.[/quote]I read that thread. But in my opinion, even though they will allow you to import mtlx files, they clearly want to replace MaterialX with their own system. You can import mtlx, but not export it, which beats mtlxs purpose of being an universal interchange format. So why not go USD all the way and skip the MaterialX part.