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: 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