← ArchivePaper2025
Combining the Benefits of Nodes and Layers in a USD World
James Pedlingham, Fanny Chaleon, Christian Aguilera, Gary Jones, Arielle Martin, Thibaut Van Waeyenbergh
Foundry introduces the UsdSuperLayer node in Katana, providing a procedural on-demand approach that prevents full stage recomposition when editing large character and shading graphs.
Abstract
Katana’s [Foundry 2025a] strength is its procedural node graph architecture which provides dynamic and scalable workflows - studios are no strangers to reaching scenes containing tens of thousands of nodes. The layer-based nature of Universal Scene Description (USD) [Pixar Anmation Studios 2025] presents a challenge for the node-based procedural approach. At large scales, the current procedural method of creating a USD layer per node is inadvisable because modifying an early node could trigger a full USD Stage recomposition and reprocessing of USD layer generating functions. In this extended abstract, an insight into the journey towards our solution is presented: the UsdSuperLayer node type. Providing a “procedural on-demand” approach, enabling efficient management of thousands of primitives and extensive shading graphs represented as nodes.
How to read this
- Category
- Method / pipeline tooling (extended abstract)
- Contributions
- Introduces the UsdSuperLayer node type in Katana to reconcile USD's layer-based composition with Katana's procedural node graph
- Provides a procedural on-demand approach that avoids full USD Stage recomposition when an early node is modified
- Targets efficient management of thousands of primitives and extensive shading graphs represented as nodes
- Context
- Bridges Pixar's Universal Scene Description with Foundry's Katana node-graph architecture, addressing the cost of the prior layer-per-node procedural method at scale.Builds on: Universal Scene Description: Open Source Release
- Correctness
- Presented as an extended abstract describing a solution journey; the central claim is that on-demand composition prevents costly full-stage recomposition at large node counts, but as a short abstract it gives limited quantitative detail, so readers should look for follow-up material for measured performance.
- Clarity
- Short and accessible if you know USD composition and Katana; one read conveys the problem and the idea, with depth limited by the abstract format.
- How to read it
- Read once for the scaling problem (layer-per-node recomposition) and the UsdSuperLayer concept; if you work with USD-in-Katana pipelines, seek the fuller talk or paper for the implementation and performance numbers the abstract omits.
Builds on
Built upon by
Nothing yet.
Related work
- Universal Scene Description: Open Source Release 2016 / Tech Note
- A Deep Dive into Universal Scene Description and Hydra 2019 / SIGGRAPH Courses
- Forging a New Animation Pipeline with USD 2018 / SIGGRAPH
- Using USD in Pixar's Digital Backlot 2021 / SIGGRAPH
Keywords
This page summarises the entry and links to its original source. The archive never hosts or redistributes the publication itself.Show it in the full archive list →