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Open Source Technology

Pixar, Adobe, Apple and Others Form Alliance For OpenUSD To Drive Open Standards For 3D Content (linuxfoundation.org) 45

Posted by BeauHD from the joined-forces dept.
Some of the largest tech companies, including Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia, have announced the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) to promote and develop Pixar's 3D Universal Scene Description technology. From the Linux Foundation: The alliance seeks to standardize the 3D ecosystem by advancing the capabilities of Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD). By promoting greater interoperability of 3D tools and data, the alliance will enable developers and content creators to describe, compose, and simulate large-scale 3D projects and build an ever-widening range of 3D-enabled products and services. Created by Pixar Animation Studios, OpenUSD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology that offers robust interoperability across tools, data, and workflows. Already known for its ability to collaboratively capture artistic expression and streamline cinematic content production, OpenUSD's power and flexibility make it an ideal content platform to embrace the needs of new industries and applications.

The alliance will develop written specifications detailing the features of OpenUSD. This will enable greater compatibility and wider adoption, integration, and implementation, and allows inclusion by other standards bodies into their specifications. The Linux Foundation's JDF was chosen to house the project, as it will enable open, efficient, and effective development of OpenUSD specifications, while providing a path to recognition through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). AOUSD will also provide the primary forum for the collaborative definition of enhancements to the technology by the greater industry. The alliance invites a broad range of companies and organizations to join and participate in shaping the future of OpenUSD.
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Pixar, Adobe, Apple and Others Form Alliance For OpenUSD To Drive Open Standards For 3D Content More

Pixar, Adobe, Apple and Others Form Alliance For OpenUSD To Drive Open Standards For 3D Content

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  • Sounds like crypto.

  • Great, another bloated 3D format that I don't care about. I really don't care for 3D formats that rely on a dozen dependencies, hard to compile, or require the latest and greatest compiler. Skip for me.

    • You really don't know what USD is do you?

      • Yes, I do. That's why I don't use it.

        • I remain skeptical of your claim. It's not a format that an individual home user would use. It only makes sense in a larger pipeline with many artists working together. If you worked at a VFX studio that has integrated it into it's pipeline then you wouldn't even have a choice but to use it. So your "choice" would be a false one.

          • So, you're saying people who use USD are forced to use it because they're employer tells them to use it? They have no choice? I'm an individual, I have a choice of what format to use, and I like FBX.

            • I'm saying that the USD format is like a long haul truck. It's purpose made for animation and VFX pipelines. Sure you could use it if you wanted to, but it's not practical for individual use. JUst admit that you don't know what USD is beyond what you just read in this article......or more likely the summary above.

    • Compared to FBX which is the previous standard for 3D assets, USD is extremely lightweight.

      You should care because the whole 3D industry has already declared USD the standard (because it's really good). So if you want to deal with 3D assets... they're going to be USD.

  • USD is a good step in the right direction (Score:3)

    by cirby ( 2599 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @08:28PM (#63732702)

    It's going to end up as the "MP4" of 3D file formats, since it works with pretty much all of the major 3D packages at this point.

    Pixar did a great thing by open-sourcing USD.

  • Oh, this will go well (Score:3)

    by illogicalpremise ( 1720634 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @08:33PM (#63732714)

    Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia

    All well known for their excellent stewardship of open standards /s

    Sounds like OOXML all over again. Guessing we can look forward to a 9000 page standard with binary blobs that will make a genuine opensource implementation nearly impossible. I guess there's a few ISO members who can look forward to some shiny new gifts.

    • I prefer COLLADA.

    • Yeah it smells fishy. They are missing organizations and companies that have historically been open. Biggest missing company is AMD .. and organizations well a whole bunch .. where's Blender for example? I'll try to be positive though. It's great news for Ferrari the extra revenue they'll get from selling cars to ISO members.

    • Re:Oh, this will go well (Score:5, Informative)

      by Xylantiel ( 177496 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:54PM (#63732928)
      Yeah, the parallels to OOXML seem a little scary. For those who don't know, there seems to already be an open standard for scene and object descriptions called glTF/glb [wikipedia.org] supported by the Khronos group whose members include AMD, Valve (steam). This seems suspiciously like an attempt to box out the actual open solution by taking a mostly-proprietary standard and adding the word "Open" to it - i.e. OOXML all over again. Mozilla Hubs, which seems to be the only real open VR chat platform, has standardized on glTF.

      • This seems suspiciously like an attempt to box out the actual open solution by taking a mostly-proprietary standard and adding the word "Open" to it - i.e. OOXML all over again.

        USD was open sourced under the Apache license back in 2016, roughly at the same time as glTF’s initial release, and has seen decent adoption since then. While the Alliance and a push towards it being a standard are new, it being open is not. And lest there be confusion, I’m pointing that out for the sake of accuracy when discussing it being “open”, not because I disagree with your line of reasoning.

        In fact, it’s worth mentioning that nearly all of the Alliance members—I t

        • Khronos was tasked with delivering a replacement for VRML/X3D and they did that. It's very narrowly defined and does that simple task very well.

          Pixar/Industrial Light and Magic/Dreamworks/Autodesk/Nvidia etc created a standard to handle feature film quality visual effects. USD handles that.

          They are two very very different standards with wildly different scopes. This isn't an effort to kill glTF except in so far as companies saying "hey, USD can handle billions of objects and terabytes of geometry and tex

      • glTF is very simplistic. USD allows nearly infinite flexibility. It can handle scenes as simple as a single model for an AR web experience or as complicated as a photorealistic scene encompassing the entirety of New York City modeled down to the screws on a fire hydrant.

        It's like the difference between a JPEG and a PDF. They're both useful for different things. You might deliver a glTF but you can't use a glTF as a universal scene descriptor for numerous reasons nor was it intended to be usable as an inte

    • Pixar created it and are the main gate keepers. The other players are there to join in on the standard, and it is a good one. Most high level VFX studios are implementing USD in their pipelines now and have been for a while.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jonwil ( 467024 )

        The fact that Pixar are the main drivers for this is a good sign since their interest is in having as wide adoption of this as possible rather than locking out potential competitors.

  • I'm surprised that Dreamworks didn't throw their name in that hat. They havr already open-sourced their rendering engine, MoonRay. https://github.com/dreamworksa... [github.com]

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tritip ( 818146 )
      Pixar invented USD and much of the digital tech for the film industry. Dreamworks develops software mostly for in house use, with some of their tech going open source. And they are end users of USD already.
      • Thanks for the insight on that. I would argue that it would still be to their businesses benefit to try and contribute to the project, even if only to keep competitors from gaining a leg up from a competing standard that has heavyweights behind it. I don't mean they should sabotage it by any means, but becoming a large enough contributer to a project allows some degree of steering it. Someone more informed than me will likely point out where exactly they are (or not competing) here. Take the Vulkan API

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by tritip ( 818146 )
          DW is a happy consumer of USD and are likely represented on the entertainment industry advisory committee. Apple has been developing USD based authoring tools for several years. The company most negatively affected is probably Meta. They've been pushing a proprietary 3D format to become the standard for VR/AR/Web3d. This alliance basically torches that misguided effort.
  • Seriously, already have Khronos. Why do we need yet another organization with more standards? Just help improve the Khronos ones.

    • "We" don't need this. The stakeholders want it so they can justify NOT supporting Khronos. It's exactly what happened when Microsoft needed to kill the OpenDocument (Libreoffice) standard.

    • "What's Kronos?" says most of the VFX industry. Most high level VFX companies have been implementing USD in their pipelines for a couple of years now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      This is not a "new standard", this is Pixar pushing (with some others) for a thing that they created and that is rapidly becoming a de-facto standard in 3D workflows to become an actual documented open standard.

      As for USD vs the Khronos backed glTF, they are designed for different use cases. glTF is designed for creating 3D assets intended to be used in real time and e.g. rendered in a browser whereas USD is designed as a format for 3D modeling tools, renderers and other 3D content creation hardware and sof

  • Where's AMD?

  • I thought I was reading about all these big companies creating 3D content standards for OpenBSD and I was VERY confused!

  • SVG has become the de-facto open format for 2D vector images.
    Is this a plan to create something similar for 3D?

  • ... know that a bunch of private companies are making their national currency open source?

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