LogInTogether, they'll promote the standardization, development, evolution, and growth of Pixar’s USD technology.
Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA, together with the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), an affiliate of the Linux Foundation, announced the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) to "promote the standardization, development, evolution, and growth of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology."
"USD is a high-performance extensible software platform for collaboratively constructing animated 3D scenes, designed to meet the needs of large-scale film and visual effects production.
USD enables robust interchange between digital content creation tools with its expanding set of schemas, covering domains like geometry, shading, lighting, and physics."
This alliance aims to advance the capabilities of OpenUSD to standardize the 3D ecosystem. It is going to promote greater interoperability of 3D tools and data, enabling 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."
The companies promise to write specifications for OpenUSD's features and provide a forum for the definition of enhancements to the technology by the greater industry.
“Universal Scene Description was invented at Pixar and is the technological foundation of our state-of-the-art animation pipeline,” said Steve May, Chief Technology Officer at Pixar and Chairperson of AOUSD. “OpenUSD is based on years of research and application in Pixar filmmaking. We open-sourced the project in 2016, and the influence of OpenUSD now expands beyond film, visual effects, and animation and into other industries that increasingly rely on 3D data for media interchange. With the announcement of AOUSD, we signal the exciting next step: the continued evolution of OpenUSD as a technology and its position as an international standard.”
AOUSD will be discussing the initiative at the Academy Software Foundation’s Open Source Days on August 6 and at the SIGGRAPH conference at the Autodesk Vision Series on August 8.
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