UrbanVerse Scene Caching

UrbanVerse Scene Caching#

UrbanVerse provides two types of urban simulation environments:

UrbanVerse-160 — 160 real-to-sim environments reconstructed from YouTube city-tour videos.
CraftBench — 10 professionally designed artist-crafted scenes reserved strictly for test-only evaluation.

Both sets of scenes are hosted on Hugging Face 🤗 for fast, resumable downloads. This page describes how to download, verify, and use these scenes with UrbanVerse-Gen and UrbanVerse pipelines.

UrbanVerse-160 (Real-to-Sim Scenes)#

UrbanVerse-160 is our collection of 160 metric-scaled urban scenes reconstructed from real-world city-tour videos spanning 7 continents, 24 countries, and 27 cities. Each scene includes:

a final USD environment (lighting, ground, object placements)
the semantic scene layout (object instances, poses, categories, UIDs)
scene-level metadata (geo-region, asset statistics, reconstruction info)

You can download UrbanVerse-160 in two different ways depending on your needs.

Method 1: Download the Complete Pre-Built Scenes (Recommended)#

This method downloads the final USD simulations directly.

Install the Hugging Face client (if not already installed):
```
pip install -U huggingface_hub
```

Download the full UrbanVerse-160 package:

huggingface-cli repo download \
   "<URL OMITTED FOR DOUBLE-BLIND REVIEW>" \
   --local-dir ./UrbanVerse-160 \
   --local-dir-use-symlinks False

This will download all 160 pre-constructed USD scenes along with their scene metadata.

The resulting directory structure will look like:

UrbanVerse-160/
├── scenes_usd/
├── scenes_layouts/
├── scenes_metadata/
└── README.md

Method 2: Download Only the Scene Layouts (If UrbanVerse-100K Is Already Installed)#

If you have already downloaded UrbanVerse-100K, you do not need the full USD scenes. Instead, you can download the scene layout JSON files only, and reconstruct each scene locally using UrbanVerse-Gen.

Download only the layout files:

huggingface-cli repo download \
   "<URL OMITTED FOR DOUBLE-BLIND REVIEW>" \
   --include "scenes_layouts/*" \
   --local-dir ./UrbanVerse-160-Layouts \
   --local-dir-use-symlinks False

Reconstruct scenes locally:

python -m urbanverse.gen.spawn \
   --layout ./UrbanVerse-160-Layouts/<scene_id>.json \
   --asset-root $URBANVERSE_ASSET_ROOT \
   --output ./my_generated_scenes/<scene_id>.usd

UrbanVerse-Gen will automatically:

load the scene layout
match each object to its digital cousin assets from UrbanVerse-100K
assemble the scene with correct metric scale
export a final USD environment identical to the pre-built version

This method is far smaller in download size and ideal for users with UrbanVerse-100K installed.

CraftBench (Artist-Designed Scenes)#

CraftBench is a curated collection of 10 high-fidelity urban scenes created entirely by professional 3D artists. These scenes are intended solely for evaluation, and serve as the official held-out test set for UrbanVerse benchmarks.

Each CraftBench scene is provided as an individual folder containing:

a fully authored USD scene file, ready for simulation
an accompanying flythrough video (.mp4) visualizing the scene from multiple viewpoints

These scenes do not include reconstruction layouts and are not used for training or data generation.

To download the CraftBench package:

huggingface-cli repo download \
   "<URL OMITTED FOR DOUBLE-BLIND REVIEW>" \
   --local-dir ./UrbanVerse-CraftBench \
   --local-dir-use-symlinks False

Directory structure:

UrbanVerse-CraftBench/
├── scene_001/
│   ├── scene.usd               # Final authored simulation scene
│   └── flythrough.mp4          # Artist-created walkthrough video
├── scene_002/
│   ├── scene.usd
│   └── flythrough.mp4
├── ...
├── scene_010/
│   ├── scene.usd
│   └── flythrough.mp4
└── README.md

Once downloaded, you can load any CraftBench scene directly into Isaac Sim or Isaac Lab for evaluation.

Using Cached Scenes in UrbanVerse#

After downloading the scene packages, set the environment variables for both the real-to-sim scenes and the CraftBench evaluation set:

export URBANVERSE_SCENE_ROOT="/path/to/UrbanVerse-160"        # Root for reconstructed + user-generated scenes
export URBANVERSE_CRAFTBENCH_ROOT="/path/to/UrbanVerse-CraftBench"

UrbanVerse uses these paths as follows:

`URBANVERSE_SCENE_ROOT` - Stores the 160 pre-built UrbanVerse-160 USD scenes (if downloaded) - Stores the scene layout JSON files (if using the lightweight download option) - Serves as the default directory for saving any customized or newly generated scenes created with UrbanVerse-Gen
`URBANVERSE_CRAFTBENCH_ROOT` - Stores the 10 artist-designed CraftBench scenes - Used exclusively for test-time evaluation

Once these paths are set, UrbanVerse pipelines will automatically detect:

Pre-built USD scenes (if available)
Scene layouts and rebuild the environment using UrbanVerse-Gen (if only layouts are present)
Newly generated scenes placed under $URBANVERSE_SCENE_ROOT

All UrbanVerse training, evaluation, and generation workflows will load and save scenes directly in these configured directories.