VERIFIED ON USD VERSION 21.08

This tutorial will walk you through converting a layer file between the different native USD file formats. USD includes three native file formats:

• .usda files – human-readable text format
• .usdc files – binary format
• .usd files – either of the above formats

The usdcat tool is useful for inspecting these files, but can also be used to convert files between the different formats using the -o option and supplying a filename with the extension of the desired output format. We'll walk through some examples of how to do this.

Table of Contents

Converting between .usda/.usdc and .usd

A .usd file can be either a text or binary format file. When given a .usd file, USD will detect the underlying format and handle the file appropriately. Converting between .usda/.usdc and .usd is just a matter of changing the extension on the file. For example:

• Given a text format file Sphere.usda, you can simply rename this to Sphere.usd. When given the .usd file, USD will detect it is a text format file. This holds true for .usdc files.
• Given a .usd file Sphere.usd that uses the text format, you can rename the file to Sphere.usda.
• Given a .usd file Sphere.usd that uses the binary format, you can rename the file to Sphere.usdc.

Converting between .usda and .usdc Files

We'll start with a simple .usda file, Sphere.usda in the USD/extras/usd/tutorials/convertingLayerFormats folder. This is a text format file, so it can be examined in any text editor or via usdcat.

$ usdcat Sphere.usda

#usda 1.0
def Sphere "sphere"
{
}

To convert this file to a binary format file, we can simply specify an output filename with the .usdc extension:

$ usdcat -o NewSphere.usdc Sphere.usda

This will produce a binary format file named Sphere.usdc in your current directory that contains the same contents as Sphere.usd, which we can verify using the usddiff tool:

$ usddiff Sphere.usda NewSphere.usdc

Converting from a binary format file to a text format file and verifying the contents match can be done in the same way:

$ usdcat -o NewSphere.usda NewSphere.usdc
$ usddiff NewSphere.usdc NewSphere.usda

Converting between .usd Files of Different Formats

If you have a .usd file of a particular format and want to convert it to a .usd file using a different format, we need to pass some additional information to usdcat via the --usdFormat option. We'll start with Sphere.usd in the USD/extras/usd/tutorials/convertingLayerFormats folder, which is a text format file. To convert this to a .usd file using the binary format:

$ usdcat -o NewSphere_binary.usd --usdFormat usdc Sphere.usd

We can then verify the contents of this binary .usd file match the contents of the original text .usd file:

$ usddiff Sphere.usd NewSphere_binary.usd

Converting a binary .usd file to a text .usd file and verifying the contents match can be done in the same way:

$ usdcat -o NewSphere_text.usd --usdFormat usda NewSphere_binary.usd
$ usddiff NewSphere_binary.usd NewSphere_text.usd