Viewing a stage
Each of the controls on this page changes how the stage is composed or filtered. All of them are authored on an in-memory session layer, so none of them modifies the asset. Changing one recomposes the stage and rebuilds its geometry without moving the camera.
Variants
A variant set is a named choice authored on a prim, and a stage typically has several.
Top-level variant sets, meaning those with no ancestor prim that carries a set of its own, appear in the Info tab's Model section. These are the sets that configure the whole asset, and the section states how many further sets it is not showing.
Every other variant set is reached by selecting the prim that carries it and using the picker in the Node tab's Variant Sets card, which is how usdview reaches all of them. The sidebar hierarchy marks prims carrying a variant set with a badge.
A stage with a very large number of top-level sets shows none of them in the Info tab, since an asset that varies each of its parts individually has no whole-model configuration to summarize. Those sets remain available per prim.
Display purposes
USD tags imageable prims with a purpose: default, proxy, render, or guide. A typical asset has a lightweight proxy for interaction and a heavy render representation for final images.
The Info tab's Display Purposes section switches Proxy, Render, and Guide independently. Prims with the default purpose are always drawn.
Payloads
Right-click a prim in the sidebar hierarchy to toggle its payload with Load Payload or Unload Payload. Loading composes the payload's contents into the stage and rebuilds it; unloading drops them again.
Cameras
A stage's cameras appear in the Info tab's Camera section, in an Active picker. Default Camera uses Solidly's own orbit camera. Selecting an authored camera makes the viewport look through it with the focal length, aperture, and clipping range the stage declares.
Refinement
The Info tab's Refinement section sets the subdivision complexity for this stage. It appears only when the stage contains meshes that subdivide. See Subdivision.
Stage metadata
The Info tab's Summary reports what the stage says about itself, including prim and imageable prim counts, layer count, up axis, metres per unit, kilograms per unit where it differs from 1, the authored time range, time codes per second, frames per second where it differs, the colour management system, and the render settings prim path. These are USD's own values, reported as authored.