USD is a high-performance extensible software platform for collaboratively constructing animated 3D scenes, designed to meet the needs of large-scale film and visual effects production.

This repo provides tools to convert between SDF and USD files.

USD requires CMAKE 3.12; this package is available from Ubuntu 20.04

Tutorials

If you have already installed gz-usd you might want to visit the tutorial section.

Requirements

You will need all of the dependencies for sdformat, along with the following additional dependencies:

• USD: Note: USD support is only available when building sdformat from source. USD requires CMAKE 3.12 this package is available from Ubuntu 20.0.

  Clone the USD repository

  git clone --depth 1 -b v24.08 https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/OpenUSD.git

  Note: Only v24.08 supported currently

  Install dependencies not managed by the build script

  sudo apt install libpyside2-dev python3-opengl cmake libglu1-mesa-dev freeglut3-dev mesa-common-dev

  Define an environment variable USD_PATH to encode the install directory.

  export USD_PATH=<install_dir>

  Use the build script to compile USD. In order to speed up compilation, it is recommended to disable unneeded components.

  cd USD
  python3 build_scripts/build_usd.py --build-variant release --no-tests --no-examples --no-imaging --onetbb --no-tutorials --no-docs --no-python $USD_PATH

  For more information regarding the build options, see the USD docs at https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/OpenUSD/tree/v21.11#getting-and-building-the-code.

  Add USD to system paths

  export PATH=$USD_PATH/bin:$PATH
  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$USD_PATH/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
  export CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$USD_PATH:$CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH

• gz-usd
• sdformat

Setup

Build gz-usd. The steps below follow a traditional cmake build, but gz-usd can also be built with colcon:

Note: Be sure to build gz-usd on a terminal with the above environment variables exported.

git clone https://github.com/gazebosim/gz-usd
cd gz-usd
mkdir build
cd build
export GZ_VERSION=<harmonic or ionic>
cmake ..
make

You should now have an executable named sdf2usd in the ./build/bin directory. This executable can be used to convert a SDF world file to a USD file. To see how the executable works, run the following command from the ./build/bin directory:

./sdf2usd -h

Note about building with colcon

You may need to add the USD library path to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable after sourcing the colcon workspace. If the USD library path is not a part of LD_LIBRARY_PATH, you will probably see the following error when running the sdf2usd executable:

sdf2usd: error while loading shared libraries: libusd_usd.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The typical USD library path is <usd_installation_path>/lib. So, if you installed USD at /usr/local/USD, the following command on Linux properly updates the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/USD/lib

Another thing to note if building with colcon is that after sourcing the workspace with sdformat, the sdf2usd executable can be run without having to go to the ./build/bin directory. So, instead of going to that directory and running ./sdf2usd ..., you should be able to run sdf2usd ... from anywhere.

ROSCon 2022