This is a re-upload of the Prism presentation from the FMX conference in 2021.

Did you ever wonder what USD (Universal Scene Description) is about, but the available information about it is too theoretical and too difficult to understand?

In this presentation we will take a first look at the out of the box USD workflow in Prism 2.0. The focus of this presentation is on understanding how USD can be used by artists to improve their efficiency and make it easier to share assets and other data between different software and different departments. We will take a very practical approach and go through a little animation project step by step and we will see many examples of why USD can be useful to artists. No prior knowledge about USD or Prism is required to follow this talk.

Prism Pipeline is a publicly available software for small studios and freelancers working in CG related industries. It increases their efficiency by managing the data in their projects and automating repetitive tasks. Prism is integrated into Houdini, Maya, Nuke, Blender any many other software commonly used in Animation and VFX studios. Version 2.0 is currently in development and provides an out of the box USD pipeline for small teams, which requires no deep technical knowledge about USD, but still gives artists access to the powerful advantages, which USD has to offer.


00:00 Introduction
02:35 Department/USD structure
04:00 Modeling (ZBrush)
07:00 Surfacing (Substance Painter)
09:05 Surfacing (Houdini)
13:06 Rigging (Maya)
16:04 Layout (Maya)
17:50 Animation (Maya)
19:50 FX (Houdini)
21:42 Lighting (Houdini)
25:26 Iterating
28:54 Debugging
30:53 Compositing (Nuke)
32:06 Conclusion
34:30 Q&A