Hi.

We are teaching full USD workflows now. We have nailed down deforming USD geometry from Maya to Houdini and SOPs to LOPs etc though USD caches/USD stitching etc.

This year I am trying to work out a way to get non deforming animated USD geo from Maya to Solaris without the huge caches. And The same from USD saved out files (SOPs to LOPs). For example if I was to animate a plane rather than caching every vertex is there a way just to cache the transform/Xform data for the geo.

I have not looked at USDSkel at all yet but was thinking one of these two options is probably the solution. I have no idea if Maya can export a USDskel to be read into Houdini. (googling awaits me). I was wondering if anyone else has cracked this nut. ;-)

Best

Mark

Mark Wallman
For example if I was to animate a plane rather than caching every vertex is there a way just to cache the transform/Xform data for the geo.

Yes, only write timesamples for the xform and not for attributes. It's fairly trivial in Houdini to mask which attributes have time samples. I'm not familiar with Maya, I would assume a transforming static mesh would not write any time samples for non-animated attributes, but it might anyway.