Welcome to the fourth tutorial in the “Intro to USD Workflow” series! In this tutorial, Yingying delves into lighting in USD. The recent release of USD for Maya 0.31 features light linking. You’ll learn how to add USD lights and how to make different lights selectively illuminate specific objects by defining light link collections. Other new features, such as looking through the light and support for USD camera in render sequence, are also covered in this tutorial. The characters used in this tutorial were created using Autodesk Flow Studio (Formerly Wonder Studio), an AI animation tool by Wonder Dynamics, an Autodesk company. This innovative method of automatically animating CG characters, combined with USD, highlights a transformative workflow for the animation pipeline.

This tutorial series includes five tutorials covering USD composition, assembly, animation, lighting and sequence.

Install USD for Maya 0.31:
https://github.com/Autodesk/maya-usd/releases/tag/v0.31.0

Link to the first tutorial in the series:

Link to the second tutorial in the series:

Link to the third tutorial in the series:

Online help for USD light linking, including both Include/Exclude and Expression:
https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2026/ENU/?guid=GUID-416ED035-2FFB-4C31-B097-30BD4072C904

Learn USD terminology and composition:
https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2026/ENU/?guid=GUID-22CE6DA5-6FE3-46B7-B38A-FE5FD13304E9

Learn more about Flow Studio (Formerly Wonder Studio):
https://autode.sk/wonder_dynamics

The original models of all the assets used in this tutorial were created by KITBASH3D: https://kitbash3d.com/