Last week we covered the background of OpenPBR and MaterialX. This week we dive into the practical...
Customer Insights: Should We Be Using OpenUSD?
Every year at SIGGRAPH, we spend countless hours talking with customers about their pipeline challenges and emerging technologies. This year, one question dominated nearly every conversation: should we be converting to an OpenUSD and OpenPBR/MaterialX-based pipeline?
This week we tackle the OpenUSD decision framework, and next week we'll dive deep into OpenPBR and MaterialX integration.
Executive Summary
For enterprise teams: USD is best for organizations with multiple teams and tools collaborating at scale, particularly when those tools have robust USD support. For smaller operations: glTF remains better for single-app pipelines with simpler material requirements.
The bottom line: Today, tool selection drives success more than any other factor. If you're not using multiple DCCs with strong USD integration, the benefits likely don't justify the complexity.
The Question Everyone Is Asking
Customers told us the same story: too many applications, too many recreations of the same scene for each use case, and too much waste every time something changes. OpenUSD was designed to solve precisely that in film pipelines through non-destructive composition, layering, and sparse overrides.
Why a common scene graph matters: Beyond the obvious collaboration benefits, USD eliminates the re-export churn that costs enterprises significant time and resources. When geometry, materials, and scene structure live in one format, teams avoid the constant recreation of assets for each downstream tool. Training becomes simpler. Data stays consistent. Workflows become more predictable.
That origin at Pixar matters: it was built for very large, collaborative, asset-centric productions, then open-sourced and adopted widely [1]. Pixar really understood the problem that they had. If you do not share those characteristics, adoption is not automatic.
Where USD Is a Clear Win
USD delivers the most value when projects involve multiple contributors working on shared scenes, require robust composition and versioning capabilities, and need reliable asset transfer across different DCCs and renderers at scale. VFX studios and large collaborative teams have demonstrated measurable ROI through reduced re-export churn and more reliable multi-user workflows for look-dev, layout, and lighting [2].
For enterprise customers, this translates to specific use cases: automotive teams reusing the same car model and materials across design, simulation, and marketing; apparel brands aligning PLM with AR and retail pipelines; AEC firms coordinating complex projects across multiple software packages and external partners.
The Biggest Hurdle:The Fragmentation Reality
USD is deliberately extensible. You can add schemas for things USD did not originally model, plug in new data formats, and change how assets resolve on disk or over the network.
"Schemas allow us to extend the data available on the prim and provide a contract dictating how that data is structured. It is up to the runtime to interpret and use this data for a functional purpose" - Aaron Luk, Director of Product Management (OpenUSD Standard), NVIDIA Omniverse. [3]
That is powerful, but it also breeds divergence. Different vendors and studios can define their own schemas for physics, robotics, AEC metadata, or live-link workflows. Two USD files can both be valid and yet not interoperable if they rely on different custom types, metadata conventions, or resolver plug-ins that the other side does not have.
A concrete example: physics simulation. USD originally had no way to describe rigid-body dynamics—properties like mass, collision shapes, or joint constraints. When vendors needed physics support, each implemented their own solution:
- Vendor A might store mass as [physics:mass = 2.0]
- Vendor B might use [simulation:weight = 2000] (grams instead of kilograms)
- Vendor C might implement [rigidbody:kg = 2.0]
All three approaches produced valid USD files, but they weren't interoperable. A physics simulation authored in one tool won't behave correctly when opened in another—objects might fall through floors, ignore collisions, or have incorrect mass properties.
The real problem wasn't just different syntax—it was ecosystem fragmentation. Early adopters faced isolation: their physics schemas only worked in their own systems. No one else could benefit from their work. This created extra work for everyone and delayed broader adoption.
The industry eventually collaborated on a standardized UsdPhysics schema [4], but this illustrates the fundamental pattern: new capabilities emerge through vendor-specific extensions before becoming standardized. Early adopters must manage these gaps themselves, often requiring custom translation layers or accepting that certain workflows won't transfer cleanly between tools.
The challenge extends beyond technical compatibility. If extension authors design only for their immediate problems without considering USD's broader ecosystem goals, the format risks becoming inconsistent and messy. Pixar succeeded because they built USD around a domain they deeply understood, but fragmented development without coordination threatens that coherence.
The Alliance for OpenUSD is writing normative specifications, conformance tests, and reference implementations to keep implementations aligned [5], with NVIDIA contributing significant resources to this standardization effort through their Omniverse platform and developer outreach. Until those conformance suites are broadly adopted, you should expect some incompatibilities between USD dialects.
The Missing Piece: Materials
Materials present another complexity layer. Look-dev portability depends on three pieces aligning: USD for scene binding, MaterialX for the graph language, and OpenPBR as the common shading model.
Today's USD adoption isn't just vanilla USD—it requires this layered approach for holistic, enterprise-grade material interoperability. Work is under way to make the MaterialX standard library and OpenPBR a normative, tested path so materials authored once render predictably elsewhere [6]. We'll explore this integration in detail in our next article.
Where USD Might Not Be Worth It Yet
Small teams shipping a single real-time title or product visual without heavy cross-DCC collaboration often do not need USD to succeed. Recommendation: stick with glTF. If your pipeline already centers on glTF for distribution and your source DCC is stable, introducing USD may create unnecessary complexity without clear benefits.
In game development, studios report value from USD for asset interchange and pre-production [7], but they also note that USD emerged from film, so adapting it to runtime constraints, live level authoring, or bespoke metadata can require non-trivial engineering.
For CAD and AEC, USD is very promising as a neutral hub, but custom schemas and resolver strategies are common, which means integration costs and interop testing are part of the journey.
The Decision Framework That Actually Works
Start with tool assessment—this is the primary factor determining success:
Are you using multiple DCCs with robust USD support? If yes, continue evaluation. If not, glTF or native formats are likely sufficient.
Then assess workflow complexity:
- Many contributors editing shared scenes
- Frequent cross-department handoffs
- Need for non-destructive composition: variants, payloads, layering
- Complex scenes with heavy asset reuse
Finally evaluate implementation readiness:
- Materials pipeline: Do your tools support MaterialX + OpenPBR end-to-end?
- Custom schemas: Can partners read your extensions, or can you ship adaptors?
- Tool compatibility: Are USD versions and Hydra delegates aligned across your stack?
Managing the Transition
USD is not a one-size-fits-all solution yet. Its strength lies in providing a common, extensible foundation, but every client's adoption path depends on which combinations of geometry, materials, physics, variants and other extensions they need, and how those intersect with existing toolchains and deliverable formats.
USD adoption is not about eliminating legacy formats overnight. It's about charting a deliberate path through defined waypoints. In practice, clients will still need FBX, OBJ, Alembic, or glTF for partners and downstream tools that are not yet USD-ready.
The right strategy is to start with the specific use cases USD best supports—geometry alone, or geometry plus materials—and expand only as confidence grows. Along the way, maintain fallbacks, validate fidelity, and set realistic timelines for reducing reliance on legacy formats.
USD becomes the authoritative source of truth, while legacy formats remain as export targets for specific scenarios: game engines needing FBX, web delivery requiring glTF [8], or external vendors who haven't adopted USD yet.
Key Questions for Vendors and Partners
When evaluating USD implementations, focus on practical compatibility:
- What version of USD do you support, and how do you test compatibility with other tools?
- Do your materials work consistently across different rendering software?
- If we have custom data in our files, will your software be able to read it?
- Can we export back to our current formats without losing information?
- How do you handle software updates—will our files still work if you change your USD support?
Test these claims with real production assets, not sample files. Version skew and renderer plug-in differences are common sources of surprises.
The Bottom Line
Adopt USD when you have genuine collaboration complexity, multi-app workflows, and tools with mature USD support. USD offers a flexible foundation, but success comes from phasing adoption through clear waypoints rather than assuming a universal solution.
For teams with simpler needs, established formats like glTF often provide better value with less complexity. There's no shame in waiting until your projects grow into USD's capabilities or until toolchain integration improves for your specific workflow.
The future of digital asset management lies in strategic format selection based on actual workflow requirements, not technology trends.
How 4D Pipeline Can Help
At 4D Pipeline, we help enterprises evaluate whether USD fits their specific pipeline, integrate it strategically, and avoid common pitfalls of fragmentation. We offer feasibility studies that assess your current toolchain against USD's capabilities, ensuring you understand both the benefits and limitations before making significant investments.
Our approach focuses on strengthening USD import/export capabilities, giving teams confidence in their toolchain so migration becomes less painful. We've helped automotive, fashion, and industrial clients navigate these decisions successfully.
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References and Further Reading
References from the article:
- OpenUSD Documentation (https://openusd.org/release/intro.html)
- USD in VFX Studios (https://beforesandafters.com/2020/05/25/how-does-usd-actually-get-used-at-a-vfx-studio/)
- NVIDIA USD Custom Schemas (https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/new-video-representing-data-with-openusd-custom-schemas)
- Alliance for OpenUSD Progress (https://aousd.org/news/alliance-for-openusd-announces-new-members-inclusive-language-guide-and-core-specification-progress)
- UsdPhysics Documentation (https://openusd.org/dev/api/usd_physics_page_front.html)
- OpenPBR 1.0 Release (https://www.aswf.io/blog/academy-software-foundation-releases-openpbr-1-0)
- NVIDIA Game Development USD Implementation (https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/implementing-usd-for-game-development-pipelines-an-interview-with-polyphony-digital/)
- USD-glTF Interoperability Guide (https://metaverse-standards.org/wp-content/uploads/Metaverse-Standards-Forum-USD-glTF-SIGGRAPH-30Jul24.pdf)
Additional Resources:
