USD Public Beta

General
#1

From the usd-interest Google Group.

Hi everyone,

At long last, we think we’ve had enough external testing with our limited-release preview to warrant opening it up to the gen pop. If you’re able to run linux, please visit the USD homepage and click on the “Download USD Preview” button to sign an electronic EULA, and then grab the distribution.

We’ve tried to describe the install and configure process in the download’s top-level README file and the tutorials available on the homepage. If you encounter issues, please post to this discussion group, and we’ll help as rapidly as we can.

  • We plan to update the distribution with our latest developments and bug-fixes semi-regularly, until we are ready to go fully-open on github; the process of de-pixarifying and tightening up our codebase is proceeding well, though there’s still much to do! A few notes/caveats about this release:
  • Although the core USD and imaging modules are pretty solid and have been banged on for more than a year, here, the Maya and Katana plugins we are shipping are not yet in production use, and therefore have a few rough edges, and much less documentation. We will be migrating our active productions to these plugins over the next few months, and making many enhancements, so stay tuned. Please do send us feedback on the Maya plugin in particular, since we use Maya in a much more limited capacity than many studios, and therefore have fewer requirements in some areas.
  • The latest performance feature in USD, “scenegraph-level instancing” is present in this release, with support in the Hydra imaging system. However, high-level documentation, examples, and integration into the Maya and Katana plugins is IP. Expect more polish on this in the next distribution.
    The binary file format for this distribution is still backed by Berkeley Database (BDB). We are well underway on our own optimized binary file format, and the results so far are super-duper exciting!

That’s it for now, save a huge shout out to the many people at Pixar who helped to make this distribution possible, from refactoring, to making new build environments and infrastructure, to QA, to web-work for the download, and to those external testers who gave us valuable early feedback. Thank you!

Who’s up for some USD publishing?? :slight_smile:

1 Like
#2

I saw this… and I’m so so so so so so so so so so so curious.

So yes. When time is… well, there. Count me in.
Any videos to force my interest level over 9000 so I skip sleeping and do it right away?

#3

First you need Centos, and its a 6 gb download. I just got mine completed, so here goes! :slight_smile:

#4

Did you try it out?

#5

Yeah, got it running here. Still working out some kinks, but it works and is interesting. Though I haven’t gotten any plug-ins running yet, so there’s not much to manipulate or integrate. There’s a Maya and Katana plug-in for I/O, with Houdini on the way.

Since it’s CentOS only, it did put up some limitations on use personally, so I’ve been working on getting it working on any platform - including Windows - via Docker.

Here’s how you can test out the Python interface currently if you’ve got access to Docker.

$ docker build -t mottosso/usd https://github.com/mottosso/docker-usd.git
$ docker run -ti -h usd --rm -v $(pwd):/home/root mottosso/usd

This will install USD and build it’s dependencies; a process which takes about 5 hours. Yeah… But once it’s done, it’ll boot up in less than a second each subsequent time.

Here’s the repo.