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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

#41
post #32

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

It's pretty explicit at this point, the visionOS AR app model is centered around handing off content to a centralized renderer provided by Apple, and they've settled on USD and MaterialX as the ingest formats for that renderer.

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

#42
post #32

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

Apple worked with Pixar on USZD back in 2018 (making a file format around USD). This initiative is simply making an open consortium to guide the evolution of USD.

Apple has been preparing for the VisionPro for a long time. LIDAR makes zero sense on a smartphone, but was foundational. ARKit was foundational. A lot of their scene technologies were clearly targeting a headset, and smartphones were just a temporary kickoff.

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

#44
post #30

USD will be great for animators, but I think the biggest beneficiaries will be AI's. The question of how and at what layers AI could interact with 3D art and still give the final aesthetic decision to humans with a true artistic eye left a big gap in willingness to use AI for 3D projects. If, essentially, they are speaking the same language as humans, this curation becomes trivial and the cost of incorporating AI bec…

nvidia uses usd as standardfileformat in its omniverse 3d suite. They are starting to integrate AI into it, for example to convert an image into a 3d scene.

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

#45

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.

For one the reference implementation of USD is open source, unlike FBX where you have to depend on Autodesks binary blobs and are at the mercy of whatever jankiness comes with them. Such as the fact that the FBX SDK still isn't thread safe in TYOOL 2023 so you have to take a global lock whenever you touch it.

Even Autodesk is backing USD so presumably even they have given up on the long term prospects of FBX.

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

#47
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…

Can I open an OpenUSD file in a text editor and read it?

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

#48
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…

Can I open an OpenUSD file in a text editor and read it?

Yes, absolutely.

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

#49

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.

Python’s fork can be used to create children. Don’t forget to kill them when you’re done otherwise their memory can leak when they become zombies.

Trust me, it’s about programming. Not snake horror dystopias.

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