Pixar Universal Scene Description

Currently reading The Pixar Touch by David A. Price and they talk a lot about the types of software and standards for rendering they had to create over the years. Incredibly interesting looking back at what they were able to achieve. A talented crew for sure.<p>For those interested: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;2632830-the-pixar-touch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;2632830-the-pixar-touch</a>

There was a demo of some USD-related software at SIGGRAPH, for context: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JmH4KYcmHOo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JmH4KYcmHOo</a>

That&#x27;s interesting they didn&#x27;t just collaborate on alembic.io, despite being sister companies.

I noticed that their coding style consistently uses the spelled-out Boolean operator keywords &quot;not&quot;, &quot;and&quot;, &quot;or&quot;. Can&#x27;t think of any other C++ codebases that use this -- can anyone else?

&gt;&gt; Universal Scene Description (USD) is an efficient, scalable system for authoring, reading, and streaming time-sampled scene description for interchange between graphics applications. What does this mean for the layman? I got a 404 for the &#x27;getting help with USD&#x27; link

How does this compare with DAE, which seems to be the existing standard for this?

is this a scene graph library? does it support animation? or each frame is just a still 3d scene.