welcome

Although OpenUSD was open sourced in 2016, we are still early to the game of 3D. The future of 3D technology is set to reshape how people interact with digital content and each other. Over the coming decade as 3D environments become more accessible due to more affordable and capable devices, the desire for 3D content will grow exponentially. Because OpenUSD is efficient, flexible, and able to collate 3D assets and data from multiple sources, it is very likely to be an increasingly fundamental tool in the creation and dissemination of 3D content.

We decided to write this book because we want to demystify OpenUSD and make it more accessible to anyone with an interest in 3D technology. Currently the documentation and learning resources are either too technical or too fragmented to be of much use to beginners. For this reason, we aim to walk our readers through the fundamentals of the OpenUSD framework. We gradually build the complexity of our projects so that there is plenty of opportunity to apply the basics, revising them as you learn different ways of applying the framework in later chapters. By the end of the book, we hope that the basics will feel like second nature to you, and that the many potential applications of OpenUSD will feel much more achievable.