Edward Barnes

Developing a USD Schema

I developed a new type, “UsdGeomEye” to contain all the data relevant to eyes in an animation pipeline, along with a plugin to generate and preview instances of the type. Attributes like “pupilRadius” and “irisColour” were authored here to control the appearance of an eye instance.

It was developed using Pixar’s Universal Scene Description, a format for describing 3D data and scene hierarchies. As it is compatible with many DCCs (Maya, Houdini etc.), having developed the eye type in USD will ultimately make it importable and usable in multiple applications, making the data easily transferrable through the pipeline - a difficult challenge until now. Instances can be previewed and edited in USD’s lightweight previewing tool, usdview.

My thesis and video cannot be shared here due to an NDA.