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Does anybody know if the Blender project is involved / working towards this in any capacity?
It's similar to SideFX and Houdini, which is an extremely common way to author USD scenes. SideFX isn't a member either, just a downstream user.
Does anybody know if the Blender project is involved / working towards this in any capacity?
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.
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 extremely large scenes to be opened and authored in minutes instead of hours.
It really is pretty groundbreaking and has a ton of momentum.
The other hugely helpful component is USD has a very high-performance rendering architecture written in C++ called "Hydra" that allows for both interactive and non-interactive rendering backends to be developed and switched between at runtime. I can't think of a single commercial renderer that either hasn't already built a Hydra delegate, or isn't planning to.
Unity and Epic seem like two glaringly omissions from this.
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?
How is this different from Collada from Kronos group? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA They already made a universal scene description standard.
USD has more layering and referencing capabilities
Earlier 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?
USD started in the very complicated CG/VFX world where this type of complexity and flexibility is needed, however, Apple (and others) have been pushing it into other realms (VR, mobile, .usdz).
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.