Introduction

This project is an extensible, standalone C++ USD exporter plugin for maya. Currently the tool is capable of exporting desired groups and meshes as USD scenes, including skinned animations, keyframed transforms, and UVs. It works by reading in scene geometry using the Autodesk Maya SDK and building an identical USD scene with the USD API.

Motivation

Initially this project served as a basically a python wrapper around the existing maya-usd plugin. This was to simplify the export process within a pipeline for animators or modellers, avoiding inconsistent exports.

About a year later when planning new features I ran into the frustrating constraints of the maya-usd exporter.

I wanted to add options to reverse winding orders, returning a scene object for users to modify before writing to disk, filters for properties, and more. When looking at the maya-usd source code I found it monolithic and inextensible. Making even small changes would be challenging and couldn’t be easily integrated into a standalone plugin.

That’s why I created this project, to serve as an extensible library for developers to use when building their own exporters.

I’ve also built a GUI using the library as an example and testing tool.

Future Work

There’s lot’s I’d like to add to this project in the future but with so many other things to do I’m not sure when I’ll get around to it.

Planned Features

Custom property exports, Reverse winding order, property filters, better library packaging, better interface