Aug 2, 2023

Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA Partner on OpenUSD

[Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia have partnered with the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), an affiliate of the Linux Foundation, to launch the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) to promote, standardize, develop, and grow Pixar's open source technology, Universal Scene Description, an open source technology from Pixar, to promote, standardize, develop, evolve and grow the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD). [What is OpenUSD - OpenUSD is an extensible software platform for the collaborative construction of animated CG scenes. It was designed by Pixar to meet the needs of large-scale film and visual effects production. The software enables interchange between digital content creation tools with an extended set of schemas covering areas such as geometry, shading, lighting, and physics. [The Alliance was established to "enhance interoperability between 3D tools and data. According to the release, work by the Alliance will enable developers and content creators to better describe, composite, and simulate large-scale CG projects. More simply put, the organizations are committed to making OpenUSD more universally usable software. [AOUSD will develop a specification detailing the functionality of the OpenUSD platform. According to Alliance members, this will increase compatibility and allow for broader adoption, integration, and implementation. The Alliance will also facilitate a forum for users to collaborate in defining the future of OpenUSD. [Members of the AOUSD Steering Committee will be presenting at the Academy Software Foundation's Open Source Days on August 6 and at the Autodesk Vision Series at the SIGGRAPH conference on August 8. Until then, interested parties can read all about the software on the OpenUSD website, including download links, tutorials, FAQs, and demo assets.