LogInThe company calls USD "the HTML of 3D Worlds" and the key to unlocking the metaverse.
NVIDIA published a blog post, explaining what Universal Scene Description (USD) is and what features the company is working on.
"Originally invented and open-sourced by Pixar Animation Studios to support large-scale visual effects of feature films, USD is an open scene description with APIs for creating, editing, querying, rendering, collaborating, and simulating in virtual worlds," starts Aaron Luk, Senior Engineering Manager, USD Ecosystem. It can be used in many practical tasks, including creating digital twins and assembling parts. "The geometry, shading, lighting, and non-graphical properties such as electrical info and sensor data are composed in a USD layer stack and presented as an autonomous robot."
Luk mentions four properties of USD:
- Composition Engine: The composition engine enables the assembly of data from numerous sources as individual layers and the authoring of sparse, non-destructive overrides on top of those layers. This preserves the integrity of source data ingested in the USD ecosystem.
- Custom Schemas: The data model of USD is fully extensible with custom schemas. USD itself comes bundled with core schemas such as geometry and shading. NVIDIA has worked with Pixar and Apple to create physics schemas for rigid bodies. Other custom schemas are being explored to further expand the ecosystem for digital twins and virtual worlds.
- Asset Resolver & Data Storage: USD is entirely filesystem agnostic. The data is not tied to filesystems or any other persistent storage. It can even be procedurally generated. This is made possible by USD’s plugin system for asset resolvers and file formats.
- Hydra: USD can feed different renderers out of the box like Pixar Storm and Renderman with Hydra, a generalized pipeline for custom renderers. NVIDIA has also integrated real-time ray tracing and physically accurate rendering support with Hydra.
At the moment, NVIDIA is developing Unicode Identifier Syntax for USD "to bring international character support to USD workflows". It is also working on USD data models for geospatial posing with WGS84, a geodetic datum describing the curvature of the earth, which will allow USD content to reference real-world geometry using geospatial coordinates.
Recently, NVIDIA contributed to USD development to add Python 3 support, usd-core to PyPI, Material Definition Language (MDL) materials support, and Schema for rigid body dynamics simulation.
In the future, NVIDIA will add the following features to USD:
- glTF interoperability
- USD compatibility testing and certification suite
- High-speed incremental updates
- Real-time proceduralism
- Compatibility with browsers
- Real-time streaming of IoT data
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