Log into your account to keep track of your progress. You can work through the lessons without logging in but your progress will be lost when you refresh the page.

TOTAL DURATION: 3h 16m 14s

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.

This course will take viewers through the process of building USD Assets according to the ASWF USD Working Group’s guidelines. Some of the topics covered in this course are: understanding and creating variants, going step-by-step through the asset structure guidelines, learning how to use the Component builder, and working through a practical example of setting up a small scene. The goal for this course is to understand the specifics of USD Assets, and how to properly set their hierarchies for your specific needs.

CREATED BY

PArcara09
PETER ARCARA

SideFX Training Lead

More from Peter Arcara

COMMENTS

  • __feisar__ 2 years, 2 months ago  | 

    Fantastic tutorials on USD, Peter!!
    SideFX has really been stepping up the training. Please keep going!

  • Imconected 2 years, 1 month ago  | 

    One of the best resources for USD authoring out there can wait for more about animated USD's assets.

    Thanks for putting this together.

  • conomara 1 year, 12 months ago  | 

    this stuff is well presented gold, and super appreciate the supporting files. thanks alot.
    also thanks for referencing the guidelines doc from the working group for additional reading

  • Yann_P 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    Hello Peter !
    Thanks -again- for your videos, great source of information and "how-to" !
    I have an almost not relevant question : what text editor are you using ?
    I'd like to have this section folding ability when looking at usda files :)

  • SpeLL 11 months, 1 week ago  | 

    Amazing tutorial!
    Thank you very much!

  • jnrnkns 4 months, 4 weeks ago  | 

    thanks for the great tutorial!!
    and one question->
    there is no .hip file included in the project files download right?
    i think it would be super helpful if you could provide the .hip to be able to go into details.
    e.g. where the `@sourcename` expression comes from... (in the material variants section) is it a TOPs? variable?

    many thanks

    • jnrnkns 4 months, 4 weeks ago  | 

      ok nevermind, i found the hip-file, when downloading and unzipping on windows...
      maybe unzipping problem on macos?!?

      • PArcara09 4 months, 4 weeks ago  | 

        Hey there! Glad you found the videos helpful.

        The @sourcename attribute is one that is specific to reference nodes, and I believe it's created internally to that LOP. It's just a way to reference the name of the file being loaded and use that to name the destination primitive for the source USD content. No TOPs being used there. Hope that helps.

  • geetee2323 3 months, 1 week ago  | 

    is there anyway to get the turbosquid files, cant see them in the link and nowhere else.
    thanks, and supremely brilliant hip & tutorial!!

    • PArcara09 3 months, 1 week ago  | 

      Hi there! Thanks for bringing this to our attention, and sorry for the inconvenience. We're currently looking into a solution for this. I'll make sure to reply again as soon as we have something figured out.

      Thanks also for the kind words.

  • richardbao 2 months, 1 week ago  | 

    Is there any solutions now?

    • PArcara09 2 months, 1 week ago  | 

      Hi there! Unfortunately we've tried to get in contact with the creator of the supplemental file, but we haven't heard back from him. So, our plan is to find some new geometry that we can replace the old stuff with. This will mean that I need to re-record the videos and update the file. That will take me a little while, but I will certainly make a comment here to let people know when it's updated.

      So sorry for the inconvenience!

      • sumodancliff 1 month, 1 week ago  | 

        Appreciate that you're putting in the time to re-record & make this course accessible again! Loved your previous courses on Solaris so I'm looking forward to starting on this one too. Do you have a rough timeline of when we might expect to see this updated?

        • PArcara09 1 month, 1 week ago  | 

          I have just come back from vacation, and I have another course that will be releasing soon. Once that is done I am going to start work on fixing this course. I know that isn't a firm date, but that's my plans as of right now. Hope that helps!

          • sumodancliff 1 month ago  | 

            Amazing, thanks for the heads up and looking into this!

  • thracekelsick 1 month, 2 weeks ago  | 

    This is a very helpful course, but I'm having trouble reconciling the Primitive Kind logic. In the first course, the example shown makes sense:

    /Models ← group
    /Characters ← group
    /Lady ← assembly
    /Skin ← component
    /mesh
    /Purse ← component
    /mesh

    But in the asset building structure shown here, the highest level of primitive is "Component". Why wouldn't "HiRes_Pig" be a group in that context?

    • PArcara09 1 month, 1 week ago  | 

      Do you have a video & timecode that you've seen this hierarchy? It's been quite a while since I've made this course, and it's tough to remember everything contained within it.

      • thracekelsick 1 month, 1 week ago  | 

        I was referencing the "Primitive Terminology" chapter in the first part, USD Basics. It seemed that the logic there was, multiple character components would make an assembly. But in the "asset structure guidelines" chapter of this course, it seems that the highest primitive kind (under the root) of an individual asset should always be a component? Or is that something to do with the ASWF guidelines

        • PArcara09 1 month ago  | 

          Ok, I think I see where the disconnect is. Let me try to clarify a bit.

          In the example you gave from the Basics course, the reason that /Models and /Characters are "Groups" is because those aren't being published with the assets. They are organizational primitives that would probably be created by the Layout Artist or automatically by some pipeline process. The file published to disk would have it's root primitive as /Lady. This primitive would be set to an Assembly because it contains some other files from disk that are components, in this case /Skin and /Purse. Assemblies and Components are used to denote where files on disk exist, and help make more sense out of complicated scene graphs.

          Hopefully that explanation clarifies things a bit.

          • thracekelsick 1 month ago  | 

            Thanks, that does help. To clarify and continue with this analogy, if the "HiRes_Pig" had, say, a weapon and a hat, those would also be components, and all the components together (Pig Head, Weapon, and Hat) would make an "assembly"?

            • PArcara09 1 month ago  | 

              Yeah, that is how I would see them going together based on the guidelines. Glad it's making more sense!

Please log in to leave a comment.