Hello,
I was wondering if it's going to be possible somehow to update USD separately from the shipped version? We are looking at using 21.08 due to fixes with Arnold-USD, but 18.5 uses 20.08 (which is old, released July 21, 2020...).

Is this possible?

regards
stefan

Houdini releases are locked to specific USD versions. Houdini 18.5 will always ship with USD 20.08. We do provide the HoudiniUsdBridge repository on github that you can use to replace the USD library that ships with Houdini with a new USD library that you build. However it was pointed out to me recently that the Pixar namespace encodes the "20" part of the version number in its internal C++ namespace, which makes it impossible to replace the H18.5 USD library with a "21.xx" build of USD. So even going this route, I think the answer is still "no" (though even if it was possible, the amount of HoudiniUsdBridge code you'd need to change to make 18.5 work with 21.08 would be considerable). However I can tell you that Houdini 19 will be shipping with USD 21.08...

At least some good news, so... should I ask the next question?

regards
stefan