I’m encountering a issue when converting a .usd scene created in Isaac Sim 4.5.0 to an .sdf file for use in Gazebo Harmonic. The resulting .sdf file contains models with extremely small geometric volumes and completely missing textures—everything appears as solid black in Gazebo.
Notably, in Isaac Sim, the original mesh scale is explicitly set to (0.003, 0.1, 0.001), but after conversion using usd2sdf, the generated SDF contains the following:
StairsSlope/Cube_01/StairsSlope/Stairs/Cube_01/Cube_01.dae 9.0000001564621932e-06 0.010000000298023226 1.0000000949949049e-06
These scale values differ from the original by several orders of magnitude, causing the models to become nearly invisible or effectively “disappear” in Gazebo.
The USD ecosystem, especially within NVIDIA Omniverse, offers a rich library of highly realistic 3D assets. If the gz-usd ( usd2sdf ) conversion pipeline could be improved to correctly handle geometry scaling and material/texture mapping, Gazebo would gain access to a vast collection of photorealistic models. Furthermore, users could leverage Omniverse’s powerful material authoring and texturing tools—then seamlessly convert those enhanced assets into SDF format for simulation.
Improving the USD-to-SDF workflow would significantly elevate the visual fidelity and realism of Gazebo environments, bridging the gap between high-fidelity design and robotics simulation.