USD also allows a renderer to attach its data to the scene description, which means the definitions and assignments of shaders, materials, lights, cameras and environments persist within the USD file. V-Ray’s current support for USD is expected to give artists more flexibility and will continue to evolve as USD itself continues to develop. As pipelines have begun to incorporate more tools and grow more complex, the need for a universal format has become more significant. Initially developed by Pixar, the USD format holds the most common types of scene data – geometry, shaders, lights, rigs, hair and so on – to make it easier to share and dynamically update assets without workarounds or compromises to accommodate different software. The USD interchange format stores and moves scene data between different applications.
Chaos Group has completed the first steps of its support for Universal Scene Description (USD) in V-Ray 5 for Maya and V-Ray 5 for Houdini as a non-destructive way for artists to collaborate and assemble their scenes.