I posted about this on the AOUSD forum and got crickets. I’m hoping posting here for more visibility might get me some insight:
Frankly, the OpenUSD plugin system kinda sucks, and I want something better.
I’d like to set up something akin to maya’s modfiles, and I was hoping I could write my own python plugin to add some useful logic to USD’s plugin loader… But I couldn’t find any mechanism to auto load a plugin. Usd detects plugins, but it only ever lazily loads them as far as I can tell (I read through the source). Is there any way (even a stupid hack!) to force a plugin to load when the USD library is loaded/initialized?
Having to know the location of every version of every plugin ahead of time means lots of pre-launch logic setting up the usd plugin paths, and it means distribution of plugins based on different versions gets complicated. And since Maya and Houdini each use different usd versions per software version, we have to keep lots of different compiles of our plugins around. That logic gets more complicated when the usd version for the current DCC version gets updated. Plus we have to juggle windows and linux paths.