USD Basics with Houdini Solaris

Solaris is Houdini’s environment for layout, lookdev and lighting and is built on USD, the open source Universal Scene Description format created by PIXAR. This makes Solaris a great environment for interacting and authoring USD scenes and assets. USD is an optimized system for organizing your assets that allows for efficient workflows for teams or individuals.

Lessons and Project Files: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/usd-...

In this course you will explore the Solaris UI, beginning with a discussion about what USD is, how to manipulate objects in the Solaris viewport, and how to import and render SOPs geometry in Solaris using Karma. The goal is to introduce you to the concepts of USD and how they are implemented in Houdini using Solaris.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:30 Terminology
00:03:10 Resources
00:05:28 USD Import/Export SOP
00:10:23 USD Formats and Extensions
00:15:02 ASCII .usd files
00:17:04 Similar File Types
00:19:17 The Scene Graph Tree Pane
00:25:11 The Scene Graph Details Pane
00:28:06 Primitive Terminology
00:35:05 Color Meanings
00:39:29 Viewport Manipulation
00:46:01 Collections and Selection Sets
00:53:00 Primitive Matching Patterns
00:59:17 Scene Import
01:03:35 SOP Import
01:06:29 SOP Create
01:09:25 Writing USD to Disk
01:13:16 Import and Render with Karma