HdAurora is a USD Hydra render delegate that allows Aurora to be used in applications that implement a USD Hydra scene delegate.
Hydra is a framework used by many applications such as Autodesk Maya to support multiple renderers implemented as render delegates. Examples of other render delegates include HdStorm, a rasterization renderer that uses OpenGL, Vulkan, and Metal, and HdArnold, which enables the use of Autodesk Arnold.
To learn more about Hydra, see this presentation from SIGGRAPH 2019 as well as the USD documentation.
The easiest way to run HdAurora is using the usdview tool, part of the USD toolset that is used for viewing USD files.
Once HdAurora has been deployed to your USD folder you can select hdAurora in usdview using the renderer menu with the Aurora option:
The provided Python script deployHdAurora.py can be used to deploy HdAurora to a USD installation (and create a new USD installation if one does not exist.)
Run the following command to create a new USD installation located at ../USD relative to the Aurora repository root and deploy HdAurora to it. Creating a new USD installation requires a command prompt with compiler tools, such as "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019", and should be run from the root of the Aurora repository (this will take up to an hour to complete):
python Scripts/deployHdAurora.py ../USD --externals_folder=../AuroraExternals --config=Release --build
You can then run usdview from the bin subfolder within that installed USD folder, replacing AssetFolder with the folder the Autodesk Telescope USD model was unzipped into.
cd ../USD/bin
python usdview AssetFolder/AutodeskTelescope/AutodeskTelescope.usda--renderer=hdAurora