What's the value proposition for USD?

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It might be some time before commercial game engines integrate USD at the level mentioned above. Functionally Unity might be there, but if I recall correctly the author has stated there is more work to be done on the performance end.

With that said, there are benefits to adopting USD on the DCC side alone. USD assets load faster, can have much richer compositions, are app universal, and stay in memory on DCC scene change (unless cleared). It just may not be easy to edit all that data quite yet without custom tools.

If you work for a small game studio without the resources to explore a foundational workflow shift, it is probably too early to adopt USD for anything more than proxy representations of assets. Do consider a switch though when your primary DCC apps are further along with their integrations.

As im not allowed to post more than 3 posts in a row on my summary USD thread i post this here.
The Autodesk USD video is now online.
https://area.autodesk.com/blogs/thebuzz/universal-scene-description-open-source-at-autodesk/

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Hm, one of the things that’s kind of holding Blender back from being more widely adopted in gamedev is actually the fact that it’s FBX support is lacking, as far as I remember it’s GPL license does not allow it to integrate FBX SDK, so instead it uses collada for that. Not that it’s unsolvable problem, but just something of a inconvenience.

Do I understand this correctly that since USD is open Blender will be able to properly integrate it? This could be an important improvement.

I believe someone is already working on USD support within blender.
But yes the license that USD is released under does make it more compatible with blender than FBX.

Yes they are working on it.

Cool, I believe this may be another leap for Blender adoption in the industry :slight_smile: