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USD Procedural

Table Of Contents

 

Overview

The USD Procedural can be used to load a USD file, it works similarly to a Redshift proxy file and can be used in Houdini, Solaris, Maya, and Katana. The USD assets are only loaded at render time which allows the primary scene file to be lightweight and speeds up scene extraction time. If you are working in a USD environment where all DCCs use the same assets then Redshift can directly use these as well.

The USD procedural supports instancing as long as a DCC's instancing tools are used, at this time instancing is not automatic.

The USD Procedural can be used in Katana but you must also have Houdini installed because it is compiled against the Solaris USD libs. The same installation steps covered below for Houdini also apply to Katana.

 

Installation

Before the USD Procedural can be used it must be manually installed, this is accomplished by moving the correct "RSProceduralUSD.dll" file into Redshift's "Procedurals" directory.

This process must be completed anytime you change your version of Redshift - upgrades or downgrades.

 

Step 1: Determine which USD version you are using

Each version of Houdini supports a different version of USD, to find out which USD version you are using open Houdini and click on the "About Houdini" option in the Help menu.

Opening the About Houdini panel

In the About Houdini panel enable the "Show Details" option to list the "USD Version" as pictured below, in this example it is USD Version 22.05, this version number is important for the next step.

Houdini USD Information

 

Step 2: Installing the USD Procedural

Close Houdini and navigate to the following location on your hard drive:

C:\ProgramData\redshift\Procedurals\usd

 

Here you will see multiple folders that correspond to different versions of USD and different DCCs. Houdini, Solaris, and Katana use the folders titled "Solaris_" and Maya uses the generic "USD_" folder.

USD Version folders

 

Open the folder that matches the USD Version you found in Step 1 and copy the "RSProceduralUSD.dll" file inside to the Procedurals folder located here:

C:\ProgramData\redshift\Procedurals

Installing the RSProceduralUSD.dll file

Now you can use the USD Procedural.