USD (Universal Scene Description) is a 3D format originally developed and open-sourced by Pixar Animation Studios. As its name implies, USD is great because it is universal. It makes 3D graphics data interchangeable between artists and pipeline steps. Furthermore, it is non-destructive and collaboration- and iteration-friendly. Because of this, lots of 3D companies are adopting a USD pipeline. Thus, RapidCompact has expanded its USD support to adapt to the industry´s needs.

For September´s Model of the Month, we present a coffee machine model, that can be found on CGTrader. This complex model is a very good example to showcase our support improvements. The original model, while impressive, is too large to be used in real-times applications. In total, the coffee machine is 48MB having about 1.5 million polygons. However, after just a few clicks in RapidCompact, the USD model can be optimised down to 12.7MB, with around 450K faces without losing any detail.

This optimization is possible thanks to the improved detection of instantiated meshes. With this functionality, the cups, which are instances, are detected and the meshes are optimized. Furthermore, thanks to the USD export profiles, this output model could be directly used in ArKit or Omniverse. 

This is not all. Although this model does not have multiple UVs, RapidCompact can now export USDs containing them. Similarly, models containing Alpha masks can now also be exported as USDs. 

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Further optimized to 3 MB for web 3D, AR & VR

As always, you can take a closer look at our Model of the Moth in the Embed we have prepared for you. The 12 MB USD model was further optimized to just 3 MB  using Draco lossy compression and converted to glTF and USDZ formats for viewing on web and mobile devices. Do you have any USD model you want to optimize or need an optimized USD output? Go test yourself the new capabilities of RapidCompact and tell us what you think about them.