This project is an attempt at making an entire short-movie with Pixar's Universal Scene Description (USD) format and workflow.

USD is a new file format for describing complex 3D scenes and hierarchies. It provides a new way of composing and aggregating data and objects as layers and integrates with various 3d software and tools.

This project was made with Simon Lambin and Guillaume Roeder at ArtFX Montpellier in 2021.

Process

We started with a story of a car chase in the desert, a good way to have enough assets and environment to learn as much things as possible.

Then we needed to make the assets and export them in USD. For the car it was straightforward from Blender:

The it can be viewed in usdview which is an Hydra delegate viewer (included with USD tools):

It was then brought into Solaris in Houdini which is a new lookdev, lighting and scene building workspace that natively supports USD.

It becomes very handy to inspect, construct and assign materials to objects:

The FX of the smoke was also made in Houdini and exported as USD frames. The whole was rendered in Arnold:

Through the use of variants, we were able to scatter variations of rocks and cactuses across a generated landscape.

USD and Solaris gives us the flexibility of procedurally assembling scenes and it was fun to learn!