Uninstalling the version that ships with Visual Studio and using this one instead solved the problem. I ran into some issues with CMake for Visual Studio being outdated and causing problems. The virtual environment doesn’t provide the Python libraries that are needed during the build. I tried to use a virtual environment for installing the required Python packages and running the build, but it wouldn’t work.

Also the following Python packages are needed. It’s important that the python and pip commands point to the Python 2 installation. Visual Studio 2015 (for Maya 2018.6) choco install visualstudio2015professionalĬhoco install visualcppbuildtools Visual Studio 2017 (for Maya 2020.2) choco install visualstudio2017professionalĬhoco install visualcpp-build-tools Python choco install python2 It’s important to use the correct version of Visual Studio based on the targeted version of Maya. Make sure you have the following programs installed.

Manic Machine: Tutorial: Setting Up and Building Pixar’s USD on Windows.

It goes more into the details of building USD for Windows. In this regard a blog post from Manic Machine has been very helpful. However I found that especially for Windows they lack some specifics. Additional Resourcesīoth repositories provide detailed information on how to build them. That’s why ended up building v0.5.0 for Maya 2018.6. I settled with these versions because v0.6.0 of the Autodesk USD plugin would not run for Maya 2018.6 and Maya 2020.3. This blog post describes my process of building v20.11 of the Pixar USD Framework, v0.5.0 of the Autodesk USD plugin for Maya 2018.6, and v0.6.0 of the Autodesk USD plugin for Maya 2020.2. Especially for building the USD Maya plugin I found it important to use the correct combination of versions. Since then I built different versions of Pixar’s USD framework and the USD Maya plugin from Autodesk for Windows.īuilding both seems to be a daunting task, but it turns out to be pretty straightforward, once the setup is correct. However it took me until 2019 to get hands-on experience with it.

With my background in VFX I’ve been closely watching the development around USD for a couple of years.