Snow Loads, Composed
An ASCE 7-22 structural snow analysis rebuilt as a living OpenUSD scene — where the engineering numbers themselves drive the snow you watch pile up.
The Challenge
Snow load is invisible until a roof fails, and the math hides a surprise: the small porch roofs carry far more than the big one.
Structural snow analysis lives in code tables and spreadsheets, and it hides a counterintuitive result: on this farmhouse the small, low porch roofs carry roughly six times the load of the big steep one. I wanted to make that finding something you could see rather than read. The second challenge was technical — to push OpenUSD past its usual job as a flat file exchange and use it as a real composition system, where the analysis data drives the geometry instead of decorating it.
The Approach
The data builds the snow, not the artist. Every depth, color, and drift is computed from the building code and driven straight into the scene.
I rebuilt the ASCE 7-22 calculation as a layered USD scene in NVIDIA Omniverse Composer, with a Python engine computing each roof's load straight from the code rules. Those numbers drive three things at once: how deep the snow grows, a blue-to-red heatmap of stress, and the wind-driven drift piling against the walls. Everything is wired through USD variants and time samples, so switching a load case or scrubbing the storm updates the geometry and color live — nothing is hand-painted.
The Impact
One stage tells the whole story — the storm building, the load concentrating, and the house peeling back to its structure, all without leaving the scene.
The finished piece behaves as a single coherent system: two independent switches — load scenario and snowfall intensity — compose on the same stage, the snow accumulates across the storm, and the heatmap makes the drift concentrations obvious at a glance. Because the house is built from payloads, you can peel it back to its underlying structure without ever leaving the scene. It stands as both a portfolio piece and a reusable reference workflow — evidence that USD composition can carry real engineering, not just models.
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