I agree, these are open source technologies that are becoming standards, the community should at least have a good look at them, which is why I started this conversation, some knowledgeable peoples usually come along and give us the right info!
Not directly related to Blender but it may give some insights why developers think carefully before integrating promising technology like USD.
I’m one of the contributors to the appleseed render project and we had been approached by a developer of USD if we want to integrate a USD Hydra render delegate into appleseed-Maya together with a Maya to Hydra scene converter. The timing was in principle good, in that we have to integrate a preview render into our Maya plugin and having appleseed as a render back-end to Hydra would be great.
However, we decided to postpone the USD implementation to a later point because of the amount of additional 3rd-party dependencies it would introduce. As a purely opens-source project without professional developers it is important for us to keep dependencies at a minimum and have the code easy to compile for others. Maintaining code for 3 platforms and 4 dcc applications with several generations of SDKs and mandated compiler generations is no small feat.
Now Pixar is actively working to reduce dependencies or make it optional (OpenSubdiv, Ptex, Python, and OpenImageIO) so that these concerns are becoming less of an issue.
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That’s not correct at all. Optix is a graphics API provided by nVidia that focuses on efficient light transport on their GPUs. It happens to include a denoiser, but that’s a very small piece of what you can use the Optix library for.
FWIW the render delegate shouldn’t have those dependencies (other than on USD itself). Take a look at how our build works at https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/RadeonProRenderUSD
The issue is more building and keeping around USD libs itself. It would be nice to have pre-built libraries out there to make this easier for users for sure.
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Thanks for the info.
We clearly intend to support USD at some point, however we’re not sure we want to add more dependencies to appleseed-maya right now. The Maya-to-Hydra scene converter we got offered to integrate would require a custom USD build on Linux.
Isotropix just Released Clarisse 4.0 and it now uses USD.
Here is what they say on their site:
“Clarisse 4.0 is the world’s first 3D DCC application to deliver native integration for Pixar’s USD (Universal Scene Description). Thanks to its modern architecture and complete feature set, USD is rapidly becoming the new industry standard for asset and scene transfer between applications. When using USD in Clarisse, animation playback performance is greatly improved, and assets can load up to 50 times faster than with Alembic!”
Since I am moving from Maya to Blender I would love to see this supported even as a Paid Add-On…
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they showed a little demo at siggraph 2018
@21:25 it’s impressive
Meanwhile blender doesn’t have a good alembic importer 
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It’s kinda ironic that there so many people willing to pay for technology but so few willing to make it. Although not surprising.
If finding a coder was a game it would have 4 levels of difficulty
- Hard - Find a coder
- Hardcore - Find a very good coder
- Brutal - Find a coder willing to work for free
- Insane - Find a very good coder willing to work for free
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Actually I am a coder. But I do VR coding. Everyone has their areas that they are strong in. I don’t code in Python, Nor do I have the time to learn a fourth coding language. But I do think letting the public know that this is a feature worth paying for allows other with that specialty know that it is a possible product.
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Yeah I am a coder too, I code in Python and C, love to learn how to do VR coding but the time being I try to figure out Blender source code. I completely agree that motivating coders is the right thing to do. My point was that we need a lot more people coding because there are so many cool technologies out there making it kinda hard to find coder for all of them.
Actually this is very cool technology, I will have to take a closer look. Maybe I could integrate it to my project.
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This looks promising…
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That’s just a rendering plugin (they call it a hydra delegate) for USD. What this thready I think is about is adding USD to the core of blender or at least as an import/export plugin. Once you have that I suppose you could use USD/Hydra as a renderer interface which would open up Blender to any other renderer that provides a hydra delegate.
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I’m a developer as well, I do web applications in Ruby/Rails and Python. My biggest issue is simply time. Time to learn the Blender Python API, time to write code, and most importantly time to maintain said code when bugs happen or Blender upgrades, etc. 
I have been tempted but life has a way of interfering.
cool
#MakeBlenderIndustryStandard
Well there is lot of misinformation about USD and Hydra but it is pretty safe to say it isn’t a graphics card you buy and plug in. Its more like a pcb DIY kit.
That being said there was barely any real world reference to USD implementations when 2.8/Code Quest happened and no guarantee it would actually pick up any attraction outside Pixar. (Remember PTEX? Yeah) There was no incentive for adoption then anymore than there is now to allocate couple devs for RTX support. (And no there is no incentive for foundation to spend any money/dev hours on RTX at this point)
Things have changed, it is already there in Maya, Houdini, Katana & Clarisse.
It needs some maturing and a standardized version, but sooner or later it will be part of the VFX reference platform and widely used in all kinds of pipelines.
Its absolutely not comparable to RTX, RTX is nothing compared to the usefulness of USD.
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“That being said there was barely any real world reference to USD implementations when 2.8/Code Quest happened”
Now is now, a year ago was a year ago. The comparison was mostly to reflect the fact that it doesn’t make sense for Blender to jump every novel technology as soon as it becomes possible.
As for not being comparable to RTX when measured via usefulness I don’t really have the interest to start debating that now nor do I think it is relevant for the question why 2.8 wasnt design around USD/Hydra when the ground work was done.
USD is becoming the standard for scenes to be sure. Both Unity and Unreal have Beta versions. And it will be added to iClone as well in the near future.
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The way Blender 2.8 is structured is quite USD friendly from my experience with it. In terms of delegates, collections etc. But USD isn’t meant for processing and execution, its meant for lookdev and staging. There’ll probably be a seperate USD workspace in blender just for lookdev.
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