Materials and Shaders

What Is a Material?

How Does It Work?

Working With Python

Examples

Tip

You can run these examples locally as Jupyter notebooks. See How to Run Notebooks Locally for setup instructions.

Example 1: UsdShade and Material

UsdShade is a schema for creating and binding materials.

Material provides a container to store data for defining a “shading material” to a renderer.

UsdShade and Materials will be covered in later topics and are only covered here to show another use case for schema-specific APIs.

NOTE: The material is not applied to the cube so it will not show up in the scene visually, but it is displayed in the hierarchy.

from pxr import Usd, UsdGeom, UsdShade

stage: Usd.Stage = create_new_stage("_assets/materials.usda")

world: UsdGeom.Xform = UsdGeom.Xform.Define(stage, "/World")
stage.SetDefaultPrim(world.GetPrim())

box: UsdGeom.Xform = UsdGeom.Xform.Define(stage, world.GetPath().AppendPath("Box"))
geo_scope: UsdGeom.Scope = UsdGeom.Scope.Define(stage, box.GetPath().AppendPath("Geometry"))
box_geo: UsdGeom.Cube = UsdGeom.Cube.Define(stage, geo_scope.GetPath().AppendPath("Cube"))

# ADD CODE BELOW HERE
# vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

# Define a new Scope primitive at the path "/World/Box/Materials" on the current stage:
mat_scope: UsdGeom.Scope = UsdGeom.Scope.Define(stage, box.GetPath().AppendPath("Materials"))

# Define a new Material primitive at the path "/World/Box/Materials/BoxMat" on the current stage:
box_mat: UsdShade.Material = UsdShade.Material.Define(stage, mat_scope.GetPath().AppendPath("BoxMat"))

# ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
# ADD CODE ABOVE HERE


stage.Save()
DisplayUSD("_assets/materials.usda", show_usd_code=True)

Loading your model...

_assets/materials.usda

        #usda 1.0
(
    defaultPrim = "World"
)

def Xform "World"
{
    def Xform "Box"
    {
        def Scope "Geometry"
        {
            def Cube "Cube"
            {
            }
        }

        def Scope "Materials"
        {
            def Material "BoxMat"
            {
            }
        }
    }
}


    

Key Takeaways