Hello, nice to read about this also here. I read a lot about this and have many questions. I also opened an issue on Github and simply will rephrase it here:
I tried to gather all the information about this project and I think I read every related thread trying to find out what the current state of implementing .usd workflows in Blender is.
Your .usd node editor for versions below Blender 3.4 was a gorgeous and novel thing. Blender 4.5 introduced import nodes, but there is no .usd yet. Geometry Nodes seem to be a perfect environment for working with .usd to me.
Are there still developers working on this? You mentioned in #277 that this project was paused because you were integrating the Hydra engine into Blender itself, which I think is this. The Hydra Storm Engine is very useful to me for shading in the node editor and seeing how my shader will look when exporting the mesh with the USD export operator (with MaterialX enabled). But if you developed this, why is there no information about it and also no documentation? How can I find out which nodes are supported?
NVIDIA has its own Blender build with a great .usd exporter. You can find this in the Omniverse Launcher, which is also deprecated and will be shut down in October. I read in a thread that the development of this Blender build is also deprecated. There are so many attempts to make Blender a powerful .usd editor.
And then there is Radeon Studio Kit and Viewer, which seemed to be deprecated just after 1.0.
Can you give an update about the current state of this project and the Hydra Engine?