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Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD

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Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD

#101

Post by GeekyBear »

jsheard wrote: post #79
OmarShehata wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about glTF?

They serve different roles, glTF is intended to be an asset delivery format that aligns with how GPUs work so it can be loaded onto one with fairly minimal overhead. USD is intended to be an interchange format for moving assets between editors and renderers. They're kind of analogous to JPG/PNG and PSD respectively, if PSD were an open standard. What Apple is doing with USD might have been better served by glTF, but…

> glTF is a Khronos standard and Apple refuses to work with them

Given that Apple created OpenCL and handed it over to Khronos, this seems a bit off.

> OpenCL was initially developed by Apple Inc., which holds trademark rights, and refined into an initial proposal in collaboration with technical teams at AMD, IBM, Qualcomm, Intel, and Nvidia. Apple submitted this initial proposal to the Khronos Group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#History

Apple just has a long history of working with Pixar. I think they've been using Pixar's USD as the basis for their AR asset file format since 2018.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/apples-usdz-ar-file-for...

Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD

#102

Post by jsheard »

GeekyBear wrote: post #101
jsheard wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They serve different roles, glTF is intended to be an asset delivery format that aligns with how GPUs work so it can be loaded onto one with fairly minimal overhead. USD is intended to be an interchange format for moving assets between editors and renderers. They're kind of analogous to JPG/PNG and PSD respectively, if PSD were an open standard. What Apple is doing with USD might have been better served by glTF, but…

> glTF is a Khronos standard and Apple refuses to work with them Given that Apple created OpenCL and handed it over to Khronos, this seems a bit off. > OpenCL was initially developed by Apple Inc., which holds trademark rights, and refined into an initial proposal in collaboration with technical teams at AMD, IBM, Qualcomm, Intel, and Nvidia. Apple submitted this initial proposal to the Khronos Group. https://en.wiki…

They used to work with Khronos but things have developed since 2008 - Apple has completely abandoned OpenCL and OpenGL, won't support Vulkan alongside Metal, and during the development of WebGPU one of their representatives let slip that there's a legal dispute blocking any further interaction between Apple and Khronos.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F6ns6I3zs-2JL_dT9hOkX_25...

> Apple is not comfortable working under Khronos IP framework, because of dispute between Apple Legal & Khronos which is private. Can’t talk about the substance of this dispute. Can’t make any statement for Apple to agree to Khronos IP framework.

Since the details of the dispute haven't come out it's unclear if it has been resolved yet, but regardless they don't seem to be on good terms.

Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD

#103

Post by gibsonf1 »

jahewson wrote: post #97
avmich wrote: post #36

Seen Autodesk here, which might - or might not - mean that the standard is also applicable for 3D engineering artifacts. However I see no explicit mention of this in the article by the link. Can this standard be well used for, say, designing a model for a 3D printer?

For professional CAD/CAM use cases? No. Those do not use meshes but more sophisticated and computationally expensive 3D modelling techniques. For hobby use? Sure. Most of that stuff uses meshes already. Edit: it’s actually not just meshes that are supported. But the usual CAD/CAM surfaces are still not supported.

With a brief look at the example, it looks like they represent form with formulas instead of meshes, enabling fabrication from the form, for example. This is one of the reasons BIM software like Revit is so unhelpful for fabrication as they don't use formulas to represent the form so you can't get high enough accuracy.

Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD

#104

Post by [deleted] »

franzb wrote: post #63
zgluck wrote: post #6

Something I've always wondered about: All of these alliances for this and that format/standard/whatever - do they end up hiring some secretarial staff in some office for several decades? There should be several hundreds active corporate alliances now.

As far as I know: no. It’s people like you and me from the involved companies that are largely responsible for moving things forward (most often in addition to their regular engineering work!) through Working Groups (WG) or Task Sub-Committees (TSC).

[deleted]

Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD

#105

Post by stalfosknight »

echelon wrote: post #39
LASR wrote: post #32

Reading between the lines, is Apple making moves in preparation for VisionPro?

Apple wants to own spatial computing. They've been building LIDAR into their phones for some time.

Only some of them.

Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD

#106

Post by vxNsr »

gyf304 wrote: post #90

Does anyone remember X3D[1] / VRML? X3D is roughly the same concept, 20-some years ago. Here's a hello world for X3D: https://www.web3d.org/x3d/content/examples/Basic/X3dSpecific... And here's a hello world for OpenUSD: https://www.openusd.org/release/tut_helloworld.html#viewing-... Although X3D is a bit more verbose, a lot of parallels can be drawn between the two, 20 years apart. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X…

Not all surprising that X3D uses xml and of course OpenUSD uses some form of python/json thing

Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD

#107

Post by GeekyBear »

jsheard wrote: post #102
GeekyBear wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> glTF is a Khronos standard and Apple refuses to work with them Given that Apple created OpenCL and handed it over to Khronos, this seems a bit off. > OpenCL was initially developed by Apple Inc., which holds trademark rights, and refined into an initial proposal in collaboration with technical teams at AMD, IBM, Qualcomm, Intel, and Nvidia. Apple submitted this initial proposal to the Khronos Group. https://en.wiki…

They used to work with Khronos but things have developed since 2008 - Apple has completely abandoned OpenCL and OpenGL, won't support Vulkan alongside Metal, and during the development of WebGPU one of their representatives let slip that there's a legal dispute blocking any further interaction between Apple and Khronos. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F6ns6I3zs-2JL_dT9hOkX_25... > Apple is not comfortable working…

Interesting. Thanks!

Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD

#109

Post by khazhoux »

gyf304 wrote: post #90

Does anyone remember X3D[1] / VRML? X3D is roughly the same concept, 20-some years ago. Here's a hello world for X3D: https://www.web3d.org/x3d/content/examples/Basic/X3dSpecific... And here's a hello world for OpenUSD: https://www.openusd.org/release/tut_helloworld.html#viewing-... Although X3D is a bit more verbose, a lot of parallels can be drawn between the two, 20 years apart. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X…

I was tinkering in that space in the mid-90s, and always felt the file format was a missed opportunity, and wasn't taking any of the lessons of HTML.

What I wanted (but never built) was a semantic file format, something like:

Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD

#110

Post by xbiitx »

dang wrote: post #20

Stub for arguing about what "USD" means. These comments were originally at the top level but the offtopicness was choking the thread so I'm moving them here. I left https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36962294 out because it has actual interesting information about the project.

is this about stablecoin ?
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