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A Pipeline Retrospective on USD and Conduit
Rebecca Hallac, Tim Hoff, Chris Rydalch, Ryan Bland, Oliver Staeubli, Karyn Buczek Monschein, Mark McGuire
Blue Sky Studios reviews three years building a USD-centric layer on Conduit, delivering six short films and documenting how artist feedback shaped the USD character workflow.
Abstract
Over the past three years, Blue Sky Studios built a USD-centric layer on top of its next generation pipeline framework, Conduit. This transition involved mapping the legacy Blue Sky workflows into USD constructs. In addition, direct artist feedback during the delivery of six short films provided insights that informed the evolution of the Conduit backend to support these modernized workflows.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk / pipeline retrospective: a USD-centric layer on Conduit
- Contributions
- Reviews three years at Blue Sky Studios building a USD-centric layer atop the Conduit next-generation pipeline framework
- Documents mapping legacy Blue Sky workflows into USD constructs
- Shares insights from delivering six short films and how direct artist feedback drove the evolution of the Conduit backend and the USD character workflow
- Context
- A retrospective tying together the studio's Conduit pipeline framework and Pixar's Universal Scene Description open-source release as the basis of the modernized workflow.Builds on: Conduit: A Modern Pipeline for the Open Source World · Universal Scene Description: Open Source Release
- Correctness
- Studio practice rather than peer-reviewed research; the lessons are production-proven across six short films but reflect one studio's context, so transferability to other pipelines is not guaranteed.
- Clarity
- Accessible as a narrative retrospective; a single read conveys the workflow lessons, with no formal derivations to revisit.
- How to read it
- Read once for the migration lessons and the artist-feedback-to-backend loop; note the specific legacy-to-USD mappings if you are planning a similar pipeline transition.
Builds on
Built upon by
Related work
- Procedural Block-Based USD Workflows in Conduit 2021 / SIGGRAPH
- Achieving and Maintaining Real-Time Rigs 2018 / SIGGRAPH
- USD at Scale 2022 / DigiPro
- USD and Scene Interoperability: Demystifying the State of the Art 2018 / SIGGRAPH Courses
Keywords
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