USD is part of Renderman 24, which gets a Blender release in the coming months hopefully.
Check out this thread:
There was a livestream from Pixar, where they talk explicitly only about the Blender Renderman version, but it seems to have vanished.
Edit: You can watch it with Paplo commenting, its the first link.
RenderMan supporting USD is not the same as Pixar working with Blender to make better USD support.
I watched this meeting live where they discussed bringing RenderMan to Blender. There were a lot of good info but the most promising was the display driver you talked about because it can help bypass Blender licensing and help bring other commercial engines to Blender.
But I’ve never heard about Pixar actively working with Blender Foundation to support USD.
They do their thing on their own - but I don’t think their USD implementation is Renderman exclusive. Why would it if it supports Hydra delegates?
I saw the live-stream, too. If I remember correctly, they’re using their SceneGraph API to pipe data from Blender into Renderman. I don’t know if that uses USD data structures under the hood, but like you said I don’t think it means they’re “adding USD support to Blender” necessarily.
Likewise and I could not agree with you more.