Clayton Krause
2026 Speaker

Clayton Krause

3D Pipeline Architect

Trek Bicycle

About

Clayton Krause is a 3D Pipeline Architect at Trek Bicycle Corporation, where he leads the design and development of enterprise-scale pipelines that transform engineering CAD data into structured digital assets for visualization, rendering, and digital twin applications. With over 12 years of experience across product manufacturing and enterprise 3D, Clayton has built a career at the intersection of technical innovation and practical business impact. His work connects authoritative product data, including PLM and BOM metadata, to the downstream platforms and workflows that depend on it, reducing manual production overhead and building a scalable digital product foundation that grows with the business. He is recognized for bringing pipeline thinking to organizations that didn’t know they needed it, and for turning complex, fragmented product data into one of a company’s most valuable and reusable assets.

2026 Sessions

Oct 132:00 PM2:25 PM
Blue BreakoutCase Study

Case Study - From CAD to OpenUSD: Building Trek’s 3D Digital Bike Factory (Trek Bicycle)

Atrium Ballroom B

Scaling high-quality 3D product content across a complex product catalog requires more than better asset creation. It requires a repeatable digital pipeline built on trusted product data. At Trek, we are moving from one-off creative workflows toward an automated CAD-to-OpenUSD pipeline that turns engineering and product data into structured, reusable 3D assets. This session will go behind the scenes of that pipeline and show how Houdini is used as an orchestration layer to ingest CAD, connect product context from PLM and BOM data, optimize geometry procedurally, and generate deterministic OpenUSD foundations for downstream use. The goal is not to remove artists from the process. The goal is to separate repeatable data-heavy work from judgment-based creative work. Automation establishes a reliable baseline; artists build on top of that foundation with the materials, decals, polish, and product accuracy that represent the Trek brand. Attendees will leave with practical strategies for structuring scalable 3D data flows, clarifying ownership between automated systems and creative teams, and building a durable OpenUSD foundation capable of supporting rendering, configurators, interactive product experiences, and future enterprise digital twin workflows.