The library of digital assets demonstrates the scale and complexity of modern feature film production, including computer graphics, visual effects and animation.
The Academy Software Foundation – the motion picture industry’s organization for advancing open source software development across image creation, visual effects, animation, and sound technologies – announces the Digital Production Example Library (DPEL), a library of digital assets that demonstrates the scale and complexity of modern feature film production, including computer graphics, visual effects, and animation.
DPEL was created because of the industry’s need for production-grade sample content to test hardware and software in development and ensure it can scale to the demands of the film and TV content creation process. The Academy Software Foundation says DPEL is meant "to encourage, curate, and publish production-grade sample assets that will be of value to the broader community."
DPEL hosts several assets at launch:
- The American Society of Cinematographer’s Standard Evaluation Material II (StEM2), which includes a 17-minute short film, The Mission, designed to stress-test modern image processing and exhibition systems, with high dynamic range and high frame rates.
- Animal Logic’s ALab Phase 2, a full production scene with over 300 assets, two animated characters, and baked procedural fur and fabric, provided as a part of the first open-sourced USD scene and shot context from a studio.
- Intel’s Volumetric Clouds Library, a collection of 30 VDB cloud assets, including both dense and sparse clouds, at different resolutions.
- Noa character from Amazon Web Services (AWS) – a complete animatable main character, with rig, geometry, textures, and hair groom, represented in Maya. Noa is the hero of the short film Spanner, created by AWS’s in-house production team FuzzyPixel.
“When production assets are made available to the community, everyone benefits: software and hardware developers can better test and demonstrate their products, researchers can validate their ideas and be inspired, and so in turn, filmmakers get better and more robust tools to use,” explained Eric Enderton, Director of Film Rendering Technology at NVIDIA and the chair of DPEL’s Technical Steering Committee. “When Disney released the Moana Island dataset, it generated a lot of excitement. We want to encourage more of these generous donations, and broaden what’s available.”
The future development of DPEL will be guided by its Technical Steering Committee. Developers, artists, and others interested in learning more can contribute to the project here.
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