Progress Update:
I took a bit of a break from writing code the past couple of days since I had a little bit of wrist and knuckle pain. I gave myself a bit of time to heal so I didn't permanently injure myself. While I was waiting, I read some documentation about USD in Maya. I also began to think about how an artist would interact with the pipeline.
I began by refamiliarising myself with ways to create a GUI using Python libraries. Here were my options:
PySide2 - Included in Houdini, Maya, and Nuke
PyQt6 - An alternate set of bindings
PySide6 - An updated version of PySide2
After a little bit of testing, I'm going to use PySide2 for my in-app GUI's and PySide6 for my standalone GUI.
PyQt6 didn't install correctly on Linux and was therefore eliminated.
The code that I'm writing will be largely cross-compatible between all of the GUI options incase I need to change the package I decide to use.
Here is my first test creating a GUI. It's quite primitive at the moment, but it works.
Aside from the standalone GUI that I'm creating, I'll also be creating GUI's from Maya, Houdini, and Nuke. I watched a couple videos and read documentation on how to write GUI's for each piece of software. I'm unsure if I'll run into any roadblocks executing my code in any of the apps at this time.
Peter has been doing a lot of awesome modeling while I have been coding Mesa. Here's the boot model so far: