Creating an empty scene

This tutorial shows how to launch and control Isaac Sim simulator from a standalone Python script. It sets up an empty scene in Isaac Lab and introduces the two main entry points used in the framework, the app.launch_simulation context manager and the sim.SimulationContext class.

Please review Isaac Sim Workflows prior to beginning this tutorial to get an initial understanding of working with the simulator.

The Code

The tutorial corresponds to the create_empty.py script in the scripts/tutorials/00_sim directory.

# Copyright (c) 2022-2026, The Isaac Lab Project Developers (https://github.com/isaac-sim/IsaacLab/blob/main/CONTRIBUTORS.md).
# All rights reserved.
#
# SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause
"""This script demonstrates how to create a simple stage in Isaac Sim.
~~~bash
# Usage
uv run python scripts/tutorials/00_sim/create_empty.py
~~~
"""
"""Parse the command-line arguments first."""
import argparse
from isaaclab.app import add_launcher_args, launch_simulation
# create argparser
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="Tutorial on creating an empty stage.")
# append simulation launcher cli args
add_launcher_args(parser)
# parse the arguments
args_cli = parser.parse_args()
"""Rest everything follows."""
from isaaclab.sim import SimulationCfg, SimulationContext
def main():
    """Main function."""
    # Configure the simulation
    sim_cfg = SimulationCfg(dt=0.01, device=args_cli.device)
    # Launch the simulator runtime that the configuration needs
    with launch_simulation(sim_cfg, args_cli):
        # Initialize the simulation context
        sim = SimulationContext(sim_cfg)
        # Set main camera
        sim.set_camera_view([2.5, 2.5, 2.5], [0.0, 0.0, 0.0])
        # Play the simulator
        sim.reset()
        # Now we are ready!
        print("[INFO]: Setup complete...")
        # Simulate physics
        while sim.is_running():
            # perform step
            sim.step()
if __name__ == "__main__":
    # run the main function
    main()

The Code Explained

Parsing the command-line arguments

A standalone script starts by parsing its command-line arguments. The simulator itself is not started yet: it is launched later, once we know which runtime the simulation configuration needs.

The launch-related command-line options are added to a user-defined argparse.ArgumentParser by passing the parser instance to the app.add_launcher_args function. It appends options such as --device to choose the simulation device, --visualizer (or --viz) to open a visualizer window, and --livestream to stream the simulator. These options are later handed to app.launch_simulation.

import argparse
from isaaclab.app import add_launcher_args, launch_simulation
# create argparser
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="Tutorial on creating an empty stage.")
# append simulation launcher cli args
add_launcher_args(parser)
# parse the arguments
args_cli = parser.parse_args()

Importing python modules

Isaac Lab configuration classes and utilities can be imported before the simulator is launched. Modules that need the running simulator, such as Isaac Sim’s omni.* and isaacsim.* modules or Isaac Lab classes that work on the USD stage, are imported later, after the simulator has been launched, as shown in the following tutorials. Here we import the following module:

• isaaclab.sim: A sub-package in Isaac Lab for all the core simulator-related operations.

from isaaclab.sim import SimulationCfg, SimulationContext

Configuring the simulation context

When launching the simulator from a standalone script, the user has complete control over playing, pausing and stepping the simulator. All these operations are handled through the simulation context. It takes care of various timeline events and also configures the physics scene for simulation.

In Isaac Lab, the sim.SimulationContext class wraps Isaac Sim’s simulation stack to allow configuring the simulation through Python’s dataclass object and handle certain intricacies of the simulation stepping.

For this tutorial, we set the physics and rendering time step to 0.01 seconds. This is done by passing these quantities to the sim.SimulationCfg, which is then used to create an instance of the simulation context.

Before the simulation context can be created, the simulator runtime must be launched. This is done with the app.launch_simulation context manager. It inspects the given configuration together with the parsed command-line arguments and starts only the runtime that they need: the default PhysX physics backend runs inside Isaac Sim (Kit), so Isaac Sim is started here, while a kitless backend such as Newton needs no Isaac Sim at all. The simulation runs headless unless a visualizer is requested, for example with --viz kit. Everything that uses the simulator runs inside the with block, and the runtime is closed automatically when the block exits.

# Configure the simulation
sim_cfg = SimulationCfg(dt=0.01, device=args_cli.device)
# Launch the simulator runtime that the configuration needs
with launch_simulation(sim_cfg, args_cli):
    # Initialize the simulation context
    sim = SimulationContext(sim_cfg)
    # Set main camera
    sim.set_camera_view([2.5, 2.5, 2.5], [0.0, 0.0, 0.0])

Following the creation of the simulation context, we have only configured the physics acting on the simulated scene. This includes the device to use for simulation, the gravity vector, and other advanced solver parameters. There are now two main steps remaining to run the simulation:

1. Designing the simulation scene: Adding sensors, robots and other simulated objects
2. Running the simulation loop: Stepping the simulator, and setting and getting data from the simulator

In this tutorial, we look at Step 2 first for an empty scene to focus on the simulation control first. In the following tutorials, we will look into Step 1 and working with simulation handles for interacting with the simulator.

Running the simulation

The first thing, after setting up the simulation scene, is to call the sim.SimulationContext.reset method. This method plays the timeline and initializes the physics handles in the simulator. It must always be called the first time before stepping the simulator. Otherwise, the simulation handles are not initialized properly.

After playing the simulation timeline, we set up a simple simulation loop where the simulator is stepped repeatedly. The loop condition sim.SimulationContext.is_running keeps it running forever when no visualizer is open, and until the last visualizer window is closed otherwise. The method sim.SimulationContext.step takes in as argument render, which dictates whether the step includes updating the rendering-related events or not. By default, this flag is set to True.

# Play the simulator
sim.reset()
# Now we are ready!
print("[INFO]: Setup complete...")
# Simulate physics
while sim.is_running():
    # perform step
    sim.step()

Exiting the simulation

There is no explicit shutdown call. When the simulation loop ends and the with launch_simulation(...) block exits, the simulator runtime is stopped and its window is closed.

The Code Execution

Now that we have gone through the code, let’s run the script and see the result:

python scripts/tutorials/00_sim/create_empty.py --viz kit

The simulation should be playing, and the stage should be rendering. To stop the simulation, you can either close the window, or press Ctrl+C in the terminal.

Passing --help to the above script will show the different command-line arguments added earlier by the app.add_launcher_args function. To run the script headless, omit the visualizer selection:

python scripts/tutorials/00_sim/create_empty.py

If a config or command selects a visualizer, force-disable all visualizers with --visualizer none or --viz none.

Now that we have a basic understanding of how to run a simulation, let’s move on to the following tutorial where we will learn how to add assets to the stage.