Today we released a range of updates in our products around USD.
USD for Maya 0.30
One of our focuses has been to improve lighting and rendering workflows. One key highlight around this is the ability to control USD cameras in the viewport when looking though them using native Maya viewport controls. For lights we have added viewport shapes that allow you to select the lights in the viewport. This will improve setting up camera and lights; we currently intend to continue making improvements on lighting and rendering.
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We’ve also improved USD interaction in the Outliner with two new features: Reloading References and Outliner Text Color for USD prims. With the reload references, you can force USD to fetch the latest updates to any files referenced on selected prims.
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To display USD Prim text colors in the Outliner, we added a new Object Display option in the Outliner that allows you to set the color for a prim.
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In the exporter we added support to export a Maya scene containing a USD Proxy Shape to include that USD Proxy Shape in the export as an Xform prim with a reference to the root layer file.
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Note that the camera and light improvements and some other new features require Maya 2025.3+ as they required changes not only to our USD plugin but to Maya itself.
For a complete list of new features and changes please see Maya Help | USD for Maya v0.30.0 Release Notes | Autodesk .
We hope you enjoy these updates; we look forward to any feedback.