Procedural Block-based USD Workflows in Conduit

This was a talk given at SIGGRAPH 2021 based on workflows developed at Blue Sky Studios. We present a procedural block-based approach for USD pipelines that minimizes up-front USD knowledge requirements while ensuring users can still leverage the power of native USD. Building on USD and Conduit, we define fundamental workflow principles and philosophies on artist-interaction that guide our modular Houdini- based toolsets. Finally, we discuss the successes and challenges in scaling these workflows into production. The solution was recently validated against ILM's pipeline, and proven to be functionally pipeline-agnostic and significantly more intuitive.

Check out the paper here: PDF