Honing USD: Lessons Learned and Workflow Enhancements at Walt Disney Animation Studios

During development for Strange World, we expanded on an existing Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD) based pipeline, transi- tioning Disney’s XGen to be authored in USD and paving the way for more departments to explore Houdini-based workflows. Due to the increase in data on our USD stages, in combination with remaining optimization opportunities from the first iteration of our USD pipeline, Walt Disney Animation Studios presents techniques and lessons learned to optimize our asset structure and redesign our change management pipeline to uphold interactive performance, all while sustaining existing artist workflows.