Debugging USD composition
This course teaches a repeatable, production-oriented method for debugging OpenUSD composition issues. Rather than attempting to cover every USD feature, the course focuses on how artists, technical directors, and pipeline developers can investigate real failures by tracing symptoms back to authored opinions, layer stacks, asset resolution, references, variants, edit targets, and render-facing overrides. The course is structured as a hands-on workshop that alternates between conceptual slides and guided Maya exercises. Participants first build a minimal mental model of stages, prims, layers, opinions, composition, and strongest opinion resolution. They then apply that model to a sequence of production-style case files: composed asset construction, broken-looking assets, missing scenes, references with no visible result, variant configuration failures, edit target mistakes, unexpected shot changes, and render overrides. The central pedagogy is the USD Detective Model: observe the problem, find the prim, inspect composition, identify the winning opinion, trace the source layer, and fix the correct layer. By the end of the course, attendees will be able to distinguish resolver failures from composition failures, recognize when USD is behaving correctly but the configuration is incomplete, and use edit-forwarding concepts to prevent bad opinions before they enter the pipeline.