From In-House to Off-the-Shelf: USD in production at Animal Logic

We’d like to share our journey of how we integrated Universal Scene Description (USD) in Maya into our production pipeline. We’ll set the stage by describing life in Maya prior to USD, when we used a generative scene building framework called Shotsetup. This tool had its strengths and weaknesses, and led us to adopt USD for its promised functionality. We’ll share a technical description of the choices we made, presenting the main artist front-facing tools fueled by AL_USDMaya (EnvironmentStudio2, Forge2). We then made the decision to open source the plugin, and will share the reasons why and the lessons learned. Finally, we will describe the collaboration with Autodesk around the unifying goal: from 3 to 1 plugin.