[jms55]

glTF is actually pretty good. It just's fairly minimal and lacks support for an entire scene description, lacking important features such as LODs.

Coincidentally, I help develop the Bevy game engine, and I was just talking to people about working on a bevy_usd library. From what they told me, USD is extremely complicated, and the "spec" is basically just the C++ source code. I was warned not to bother. Imo it would be better if glTF just got more support and extensions.

[kevthecoder]

Yeah, working with OpenUSD in Rust is difficult. There's been a bit of work on Rust bindings but it's not ready at the moment (https://github.com/vfx-rs/usd-bind). I believe you need the c++ code base locally for the bindings, which adds an extra barrier for development.

A full Rust port of OpenUSD would be very ambitious. It's quite complicated (e.g. the OpenUSD composition rules) and depends on other vfx c++ libraries.

I've been experimenting with implementating a subset of OpenUSD in Rust, but there's lots of challenges given the original codebase. E.g. the c++ code uses lots of base classes, downcasting and there's no lifetime information. It's possible to port these across, but gets ugly in the details (e.g. trying to avoid non-static downcasting in Rust). It would take a lot of effort to do a total idiomatic rewrite given the size of the codebase and how interconnected the pieces are in OpenUSD. I still think it's worth pursuing though, OpenUSD is great.

[vvanders]

That gives me serious collada vibes. I've been out of the space for ~6 years but I recall that collada was the thing that was supposed to solve all of this, looks like it didn't really take off.

[dagmx]

Colada was really under specified and support was super fractured. It never really gained traction as a result outside of very specific pipelines

[kettlecorn]

This is the dark secret to USD: pretty much everyone is relying on the same massive C++ project!

Projects that want leaner dependencies, like everything on the web, don’t yet have a good way to work with USD.

[johnnyanmac]

>Projects that want leaner dependencies, like everything on the web

Did the web suddenly switch to WebASM overnight or do we have a different definition on "lean dependencies"? using any of the popular JS frameworks seems to bring in a few hundred dependencies alone.

[kettlecorn]

By lean I mean the OpenUSD Wasm binary is over 10mb, last I checked.