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

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171–180 of 271 posts

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

#171

I see lots of off topic comments, but I'd like to ask as someone who played with fbx and similar formats supported by Autodesk and large parts of the gaming/CG industry what does OpenUSD provides exactly over different formats. I feel like there's never been a 3D counterpart to standards like Midi for audio.

> what does OpenUSD provides exactly over different formats USD is to scene authoring what FBX is to 3D object authoring (though it also can do 3D object authoring). USD adds complex shading, lighting and cameras, state-of-the-art multi-level instancing workflows, and most importantly, a very flexible way of referencing/layering assets and performing per-scene or per-shot overrides, plus tools (payloads) that enable…

Pretty much a next-gen RIB. FBX itself was always weird child ever since Kaydara days (untill bought by Autodesk).

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

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For people complaining about the name, USD has been already a thing publicly since at least 2013 As opposed to the United States dollar that became public after 2013? I mean, seriously: OpenUSD sounds like a cryptocurrency "stablecoin" token name.

Literally no one who uses USD as part of their work gets tripped up by this. It’s ok for jargon and acronyms to be confusing to people who are not at all in the field.

I'm in the field but don't actually use USD so when I heard some colleagues talking about it I googled to try to figure out what they were talking about... but was unable to find anything that wasn't talking about currency. Even if I Google something like "USD format converter"I tend to get a bunch of currency converters. it is kind of a pain in the ass.

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

#173
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> proper round-tripping of float values Why do so many (all?) textual data serialization formats represent floats in base-10 scientific notation, anyway? If we wanted floats that are 1. human-editable but 2. bijective with IEEE754, wouldn't floating-point hexadecimal (and "e" notation representing a base-2 exponent) be a better idea?

Some do (i.e. Nuke compositor .nk files in the VFX industry, which stores some float values as hex)... but then you loose the human readability / "understand-ability at a glance" advantage, so it sort of depends what the use-case is...

I love that a Nuke file can (usually) be passed around using no more than copy/pasted text.

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

#174
post #11

This is a big deal. I used to work at Autodesk, trying to build software that made 3D blueprints available to everyone, everywhere. Rendering things on mobile is hard, in part because you need to writer bespoke renderers, and in part because the data formats for the assets are not aligned. Pixar developed USD, and it should really help to standardize 3D tech. In particular, I hope that USD can help make it easier to…

> Rendering things on mobile is hard I don't know. You can stream Unity to mobile with the service I've authored ( https://appmana.com/watch/theheretic for an example).

Yikes the performance is terrible. You are not proving the point that you think you are

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks nice. However the issue with all 3d streaming I've ever tried is latency. It's great if you're near the server. Terrible if you're far away. It's hard so say what the input latency is for the head demo you shared. I guess about 100ms, which is totally fine for a mostly static scene with simple orbit controls. However I also tried out the Lebron James vs Father Time game. Input latency is over 1 second so it's n…

You might like this one more - https://appmana.com/watch/virtualtestdrive - because it's just better :) While of course I want latency to be as low as possible, the difference between 100ms and 500ms of latency doesn't register in the engagement metrics for these experiences. For millions of laypeople, it doesn't seem to matter that much. However, going from 670ms of time to first image (this service) and 2.5s (worst…

Couldn't bother waiting for this to load unfortunately

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

#177
post #152

I spent a ton of time in 2022 looking for people adopting USD for game development and came up with nada. It's popular in vfx but nobody in gaming seems to be adopting it in any way I could find. Has that changed since?

USD isn't usable as a last-mile format, so many game engines still use internal formats that facilitate fast edit-time to last-mile format conversion and compression, mainly as a point of pragmatism. There is some slow adoption of USD, but given that the main drivers of the format are from VFX, it's understandable that it will take some time for game devs to embrace USD fully.

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

#178
post #168
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That improvement sounds great. Any chance that’s up as a PR to blender?

I didn't submit the PR yet, but opened an issue which has not been picked up. Maybe most of the USD files used in Blender do not trigger the O(N^2) behavior.

Possibly. Do you have a link to the PR handy?

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

#179
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.

I came across a saying once that proved itself apt after a brief stint working for the government:

Always spell out acronyms upon first use in any discrete communication.

The reason this is so apt in government work is because workers become so familiar with lazily throwing around acronyms that they forget what those letters represent. I've witnessed first hand a person confidently throwing around acronyms as if they knew all about it, only to find out that they knew pretty much nothing about it aside from the letters that comprise the acronym.

In the fine article above, the acronym was clarified upon first use, and so all is well:

"Alliance to foster global collaboration for Universal Scene Description (USD)"

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

#180
post #152

I spent a ton of time in 2022 looking for people adopting USD for game development and came up with nada. It's popular in vfx but nobody in gaming seems to be adopting it in any way I could find. Has that changed since?

USD and FBX/glTF serve very different purposes and can't replace each other.
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