This is a good opportunity to learn about Pixar USD for us, Blender users. In this video, I am taking you through the basic process of using Apple USDZ, with the help of Pixar USD pipeline.

To use Pixar USD tools, you actually need to compile it yourself on Mac or Windows or Linux. However for MacOS Developers, Apple does provide a compiled, ready to use, Pixar USD tools as you can see here, as ”USD Python” module. You can download it from Apple USDZ page.

With USD Python and provided samples, you can really study some basics of USD such as knowing what USDA like and how you can build the mesh description using step by step Python commands.

What cool of course is that USD can translate into USDZ for Augmented Reality via Apple AR Quick Look on iOS 12 for iPhone and iPad.

In this case Blender 3D open source is used as intermediate tools to check assets etc. I should have used Blender 2.8 Eevee because it is so much faster! I was using Blender 2.79 and it was too slow to handle many objects like this.

Perhaps in near future, we could incorporate USD within Blender, making export and import and doing set dressings layout much more enjoyable!

Pixar USD:
https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html

Apple USDZ:
https://developer.apple.com/arkit/gallery/

Requirements:
– Compiled Pixar USD: version 18.09 comes with USDZ Convertor.
– Python 2
– MacOS Mojave
– XCode 10