wait, Apple and Nvidia in the same room together?!
Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD
71–80 of 271 posts
Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD
#72Can someone ELI5 how this is different from glTF?
What information does the OpenUSD format carry?
Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD
#73This is pretty neat to see Apple involved in a standard. They don't like to back everything that comes along. What is very interesting though, is that Meta isn't involved. Maybe because they're backing another horse, namely OpenXR [0].
Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD
#74Maybe it's a revolution, but I don't understand how one format can be all things to all types of users. BIM requirements are very different to 3D graphics and animation requirements.
I think this is the biggest mental shift to make when considering OpenUSD.
It allows splitting the data representation from the render pipeline.
On the data side, OpenUSD can support BIM just fine:
• Can store the geo representation, will render as long is there is a plugin written to render it (for systems that don't, the geo is still available to query) • Can store additional information either on the same file, referenced in a different referenced file (ex.: In-wall pipe layouts can be referenced from the main construction file to keep it small) • Can 'layer' additional information and resolve conflicts according to a well-defined resolution method, allowing multiple authors.
Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD
#75So, can we finally say a "JPEG" or "H.264-in-MP4" for 3D content is coming? (I mean as a universally accepted format that just works everywhere, not literally a JPEG on H.264 inside a scene)
> So, can we finally say a "JPEG" or "H.264-in-MP4" for 3D content is coming?
Both of those are generally considered distribution formats, where my understanding is that USD is an authoring/interchange format. In that case, somewhat more analogous file formats might include TIFF and PSD for images. or Motion-JPEG and ProRes for video.
Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD
#76Stub 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.
My dyslexic arse thought this read OpenBSD for a brief second.
Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD
#77This is pretty neat to see Apple involved in a standard. They don't like to back everything that comes along. What is very interesting though, is that Meta isn't involved. Maybe because they're backing another horse, namely OpenXR [0]. [0] https://www.khronos.org/openxr/
It probably helped that Pixar was the developer of the technology. I'm sure Tim Cook & Apple writ large think very fondly of tech developed by a company run by it's old CEO.
Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD
#78USD 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…
This was my immediate thought. I reckon this will be one of the early steps in getting to automated movies.
Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 for unspecified legal reasons.
Re: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What about glTF?
glTF is actually pretty good. It just's fairly minimal and lacks support for an entire scene description, lacking important features such as LODs.
Coincidentally, I help develop the Bevy game engine, and I was just talking to people about working on a bevy_usd library. From what they told me, USD is extremely complicated, and the "spec" is basically just the C++ source code. I was warned not to bother. Imo it would be better if glTF just got more support and extensions.