AMD has announced a USD plugin for Blender. Features include:
- Importing USD files into Blender as “references”. That is a USD file can be imported as part of the scenegraph, but not loaded into Blender’s memory.
- Assembling Blender data and USD data to form a complex scene.
- Exporting assembled USD stages for use in other applications
- Rendering in Blender via the USD Hydra Framework. This is a middle layer for renderers, meaning that once a renderer is adapted to Hydra, it can work in many places including this addon for rendering. Known Hydra render delegates are:
- AMD’s Radeon ProRender
- Hydra’s default Storm delegate
- Intel Embree (cpu) delegate
- Pixar RenderMan delegate.
- Autodesk Arnold
- Otoy Octane
- Redshift
- Cycles
- Intel Ospray