USD in Maya

I installed USD on my Windows machine, and am learning more about how to use and write tools for it. I now primarily use Maya 2022’s USD plugin for my projects. I took NVIDIA’s USD course, in which I created a scene with variants and references with Python. After completing the challenge at the end of the course, I modified one of the scenes the challenge provided, as well as added animation using Python.

Enhancements

The original challenge scene had the planets lined up horizontally, so I modified the code in order to change the positions of the planets so they were around the sun. I added a function that calculated a circular orbit based on speed, start and end time of animation, and the size of the planet.

I brought the USD stage into Houdini and am currently working on creating an asteroid belt generator to populate the scene more.