OpenUSD continues to evolve with new capabilities that further cement its position as the foundation for interoperable 3D content creation across industries. This milestone release delivers several transformative features that significantly expand OpenUSD’s capabilities for animation, rendering, and computational workflows.
OpenUSD v25.08 is now available on GitHub, and its core non-imaging libraries can be installed via PyPI with the command line.
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Here are the major highlights for this release.
Spline Animation
The implementation of the spline animation proposal is now fully functional. This feature significantly enhances animation interchange between DCC applications and lays the groundwork for rigging implementations with OpenExec.
Caption: New Spline Viewer widget displayed in the Value tab.
New updates to TsSpline introduced file version increments bringing crate file version to 0.13.0 and .usda file version to 1.1 to support writing splines that contain tangent algorithms.
UsdImaging 2.0
UsdImaging 2.0, the bridge layer between USD and Hydra, has now reached feature parity with UsdImaging 1.0. It leverages the Hydra 2.0 concept of “scene indices” to implement core USD and schema-specific semantics (like instancing and material binding resolution) to transform the scene for consumption by renderers and simulation backends.
OpenExec Minimally Featured Product
OpenExec lays the groundwork for advanced rigging, simulation, and procedural workflows within the OpenUSD ecosystem. OpenExec now builds by default in OpenUSD. This will form the basis for evaluation of OpenUSD defined computations going forward. In a nutshell, OpenExec allows developers to outfit USD schemas with their own computations and scenes will be able to provide computed values in addition to authored values. The minimally featured product milestone illustrates how to use OpenExec to compute local-space and world-space transforms on UsdGeomXformable prims, and enables exploration of – and experimentation with early OpenExec features. Refer to the Introduction to OpenExec documentation for more details.
Physical Exposure in Storm
Physical exposure controls are now integrated directly into Storm to serve as a reference implementation for the physical exposure controls that were added to UsdGeomCamera in v25.05.
Ndr Deprecation
The Ndr (node definition registry) library has been deprecated. Affected code can be updated to Sdr (shader definition registry) per instructions in the AOUSD Forums.
Sdf File Format Deprecation
The .sdf file format is identical to .usda except its extension and header. It was used for testing the .sdf library without requiring the usd library. In practice, this distinction could be confusing, so .usda has been moved into the sdf library and the .sdf format has been removed. The .usdc and .usdz file formats have also been moved from pxr/usd/usd to pxr/usd/sdf.
Embree 3 Support Deprecation Notice
OpenUSD is planning to upgrade to Embree 4.x and will remove Embree 3.x support in a future release. For client code still linking to Embree 3.x, see the Embree notes on upgrading.
VFX Reference Platform 2023
Starting with OpenUSD v25.08, the build platform supports a baseline of VFX Reference Platform 2023. Please refer to https://vfxplatform.com/ when assessing how this may affect build configurations.
New Tool for Creating Schema Modules
Developers are encouraged to use the new usdInitSchema to set up schema modules for the first time. usdGenSchema should be used whenever you make schema changes to your schema module. usdGenSchema will update existing files in the current directory if it detects any differences with the code it generates.
Work Abstraction Layer (Proposal PR)
OpenUSD has provided an interface for implementing non-TBB based task scheduling. Note that the dependency on TBB will remain for thread safe containers and other constructs.
Check out the full release notes on GitHub.
Interested in learning more about using OpenUSD? Take courses from NVIDIA’s free Learn OpenUSD series and when you’re ready, get certified.
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