We are excited to announce that the latest Blender Alpha with enhanced USD support is now on the Omniverse Launcher! A new feature in this release is support for importing static USD point instances, such as the buildings in the “City Set” sample asset (available from the OpenUSD downloads page):
(Importing animated point instances and exporting point instances are features currently under development which will be available in a future release.)
Additional changes include:
Improvements in MDL and UsdPreviewSurface material IO
Support for automatically exporting names with non-ASCII characters as USD “display names”
Optionally author subdivision schema on export
Support user-defined custom Python callbacks to modify the USD stage on import
Please see the release notes for a complete list of updates, improvements and bug fixes in this version.
Dear @makowalski, I hope you’re doing well. Do you happen to have any plans for the next update? I’m particularly interested in the current Blender 4.2 LTS version. Is there an easy way to replace the Release folder with the latest Blender version? Thank you for all your work!
Thank you @Richard3D for the quick update!
Is it because Blender already has the .usd import/export feature developed by the Blender team?
I’m curious if it’s already refined enough that further development isn’t necessary, or if there’s another reason.
Hello, I’m aware that this is an older discussion thread. I just want to confirm my understanding. To confirm my understanding, are you stating that Nvidia does not plan to develop the Omniverse connector add-on for Blender further? Or is it simply about packaging the addon with Blender in an app release in the launcher?
It is a little confusing yes. We have made changes to the “usd experimental” version, which is our Alpha version of 4.2.0. We are waiting for these changes to be approved by the Blender Foundation and be absorbed into the main LTS branch. For now, just keep download our version on Launcher. This is a package of blender, plus our own code and extensions.
