About this site

I started this site as a place to put reference material about OpenUSD and related technologies. I find myself looking up the same content repeatedly, and relearning the same material often. I wanted a place to put summarized documentation for myself and have it available on whatever machine I'm using. A public site provides that and has the advantage that it might help other people too. I hope it does!

Contact

Feel free to email with comments or suggestions for new topics at

contact@confusing-acronym.com

About the author

Hello! I'm Ryan Stelzleni. I've done a decent amount of USD and USD-adjacent work in my career. Here's a quick overview, so later when I make all kinds of mistakes you can refer to this and say "Why doesn't this guy know better?"

I spent 9 years at Pixar working on what ultimately got named Presto. It was Pixar's rewrite of the older animation system known as Marionette, and it was also where the foundations of the USD libraries were developed. I wasn't on the team that built USD, but did work with it throughout Pixar's pipeline, so I have a lot of experience and love for the format.

Since leaving Pixar I did some work at WDAS where again I didn't work on their USD pipeline, but was excited to keep up with the development and see the format grow in use.

After WDAS I was excited to join NVIDIA for the Omniverse project. I was one of the first developers with first-hand USD experience on that project and learned a lot about trying to port the library to other platforms and use it in other industries. This is a really exciting project and has a ton of potential and engineering firepower behind it. While working on it I built the original usd-core Python package that's available through pip install usd-core (with many thanks to earlier versions from NVIDIA and SideFX).

More recently I worked at Netflix on their animation studio, and with Scanline VFX, in both cases providing a lot of USD support and expertise.

All this to say, I've answered a lot of questions and built a variety of projects on USD and its related technologies. I'm hoping to share a lot of that experience here and in the process improve the documentation and understanding of USD on the internet.

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