NVIDIA-Certified Professional
OpenUSD Development
(NCP-OUSD)
About This Certification
The NCP-OpenUSD Development certification is an intermediate-level credential that validates a candidate’s ability to build, maintain, and optimize 3D content creation pipelines using OpenUSD. The exam is online and proctored remotely, includes 60–70 questions, and has a 120-minute time limit.
Please carefully review our certification FAQs and exam policies before scheduling your exam.
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Exam Preparation
Certification Learning Path
Learn OpenUSD
Exam Blueprint
The table below provides an overview of the topic areas covered in the certification exam and how much of the exam is focused on that subject.
| Topic Areas | % of Exam | Topics Covered |
|---|---|---|
| Composition | 23% | Author, design with, and debug composition arcs. A developer needs to know all of the composition arcs, how they work, and when and where it is appropriate to use each. The developer needs to be able to debug complex LIVERPS scenarios. |
| Content Aggregation | 10% | Build modular, reusable components; leverage instancing (native and point) to optimize a scene; and apply different strategies for overriding an instanced asset for efficient, optimized, and collaborative aggregation of assets (models) to build large scenes. |
| Customizing USD | 6% | Understand USD plugin development to extend USD’s functionality, including the creation of custom schemas, file format plugins, custom model kinds, and variant fallback selections. |
| Data Exchange | 15% | Create conceptual data mapping documents, custom importers, exports, and scripts for interchange of data with OpenUSD. |
| Data Modeling | 13% | Understand Usd and Sdf data structures and data types, including prims, properties (attributes/relationships), primvars, valueTypes (float, token, matrix4d, etc.), timeSamples, and built-in USD schemas. |
| Debugging and Troubleshooting | 11% | Introspect USD stages to fix unexpected or undesired composition results, identify poorly authored data, and optimize load and render times. |
| Pipeline Development | 14% | Perform high-level tasks that are important for a well-rounded OpenUSD developer or architect, including designing the pipeline, asset management, versioning, diagramming, documenting, UI/UX, writing a USD exporter hook to transform data into your pipeline’s preferred structure, managing build configurations, and flattening and removing proprietary dependencies from an asset. |
| Visualization | 8% | Execute tasks related to UsdGeom, UsdShade, and UsdLux USD domains (e.g., meshes, cameras, materials, and lights). These are domains that are used in almost every USD use case, so we would expect a developer to be more familiar with these domains. |
Exam Study Guide
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