Ah, sorry to hear that. I tried opening the Sample directly from the /NVIDIA/Samples/... path on Ubuntu 20.04, and I was able to open it in an edit layer, or just by itself without issues. That said, the internet connection is quite fast. Marbles itself weighs in at about 4.3GB, so if your internet connection is not that fast, you will definitely feel that during opening the stage.
For future reference (and anyone else who ends up with the same problem), I was able to reproduce your problem, and it is as I feared.
If you right click a file in Content Browser and select Download you will not get the full USD Stage and all its dependencies downloaded. You will download only that exact file, and in this case, it is the layer that composes the entire Marble Assets scene.
This is the button I’m talking about:
And this is what happens when I download it to my disk, and open it (on Windows even, but this is platform agnostic):
Now, if you go to the Layers tab, and expand some of the trees, you’ll see that all the references are actually missing (red text, and the tooltip on mouseover):
The Fix: In order to acquire the entire USD Stage composed in a Layer, and all its dependencies (other USD Layers, Textures, etc), you must click Collect Asset instead:
I think that the user discovery here is opaque to say the best and I’ll raise the issue on the internal ticket.
Even then, there is one more important thing to know, when you click Collect Asset you’ll get the next popup:
And here it is important to set the Collection Path somewhere on your local disk.
Two final remarks: First, while our Samples are accessed via Nucleus+S3 and can take a long time to download the first time you open them, they will be cached by default (as long as your Cache signal is green in Create in the upper right corner) on your local disk, transparent to you.
So every time you open that path in the future, even though it looks like its coming from a Nucleus server, they will actually open locally from your disk and skip the entire download stage.
Second, you may have this question:
So how would I make changes to the stage though? I can’t actually save stages to the /NVIDIA path?
This is where the strength and elegance of USD comes into play: You can create a new empty USD Layer on your disk (File → New), and simply reference in the Marbles sample by dragging it in from the Content Browser to the viewport (note if its the first time with Marbles, it’ll be slow as it downloads everything and compiles the materials).
After that, any change you make to the scene will be stored in your local layer file as an override to the Marbles sample, and you are free to modify and safe it as you wish. Here’s an example after a few transform edits, you can see the changed Xforms appearing in the Layer tab:
Hopefully this helps in the future. Sorry for all hassles you had, and we’ll work to make the user experience smoother in the future.
Matt
