What Is Encapsulation?

Prims can be encapsulated or unencapsulated which has implications for referencing and other composition arcs. A prim is encapsulated when it is an ancestor of the referenced target prim. When a prim is encapsulated, it will be referenced along with its ancestor.

Let’s take a look to see how it works. First, we’ll look at an example of a fully encapsulated reference. On the right side, we can see that we are making an external reference to encapsulated.usd.

Here we can see that the contents of the reference include a cube that has a binding to a red material. When referencing encapsulated.usd, everything will be brought over that is contained under the xform World.

Now let’s look at what we mean when we say unencapsulated.

On the right, we are making an external reference to unencapsulated.usd.

Here are the contents of unencapsulated.usd.

Unlike our encapsulated example, the scope called “Looks” is not encapsulated inside of World.

So when we reference unencapsulated.usd, the cube will be brought over but the material binding will no longer work because the red material would not exist in the new context.