Variant Workflows

Overview

USD Variants are a very powerful tool in USD composition that allows prims to have different options on a single asset. This can be done by modifying variations of the same prim parameters per variant option in a set.

Performance Considerations

For the best performance with Variants, it is best to follow a few guidelines:

  1. Author variants as close to the prim you are changing as possible, ideally on the prim being modified by the variant or on its direct parent.

  2. Variants that swap prims using visibility are more performant, but have a greater impact on memory usage.

  3. Variants that swap payloads by asset paths will require less memory, but the stage will take longer to compose after swapping.

  4. Variants that swap shader parameters perform better than variants that change material bindings.