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On the WWDC'22 talk, Apple presents an approach to work natively with USD in Xcode. Also, Apple published this code to download. To be able to use this USD + Hydra as a replacement of SceneKit, how would we do to interact with the UI?

If anyone can help with a function like apply material in SwiftUI would be much appreciated!

Andy Jazz
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Mane Manero
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...it's not just about SceneKit...

Pixar's Hydra is rather an imagery processing library (a part of USD distribution) which connects scene delegates (SD) and render delegates (RD), allowing you to potentially use any contemporary raytraced renderer. In other words, Hydra enables communication between multiple scene graphs and multiple renderers. You can run Hydra with RealityKit, SceneKit or Metal.

Professional software such as Maya, Nuke and Houdini are already using Hydra.

Andy Jazz
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    thanks Andy! Yup, I know the demo scheme is USD->Hydra->Storm. But how would we write functions to control the scene graph (like we do in SceneKit or RealityKit) on this scheme? – Mane Manero Sep 08 '22 at 13:59
  • In the form in which Hydra is currently available for iOS developers, it's impractical to use it. I am 100% sure that very soon Apple will release a convenient Hydra API for Xcode 14. It is quite possible that Hydra will even be implemented in Reality Composer. – Andy Jazz Sep 08 '22 at 18:15