+ Pixar Animation Studios
announced today its intent to release its Universal Scene Description software
(USD) as an open-source project by summer 2016. USD addresses the ever-growing
need in the CG film and game industries for an effective way to describe,
assemble, interchange, and modify high-complexity virtual scenes between
digital content creation tools employed by studios.
The powerful techniques for composing and
non-destructively editing graphics "scene graphs" that form the core
of USD have been evolving at Pixar for close to 20 years, dating back to
"A Bug's Life." These techniques, such as file-referencing, layered
overrides, variation, and inheritance, were completely overhauled into a robust
and uniform design for Pixar's next-generation animation system, Presto. "USD is
the marriage of Presto's ‘composition
engine’ to lazy-access cached scene description, with top-to-bottom
enhancements for scalability and leverage of today's multi-core systems
effectively,"
says Sebastian Grassia, Lead Engineer for the USD project.
Although it is still under active development and optimization, USD has been in
use for nearly a year in the making of "Finding Dory," bringing new
levels of performance and stability to Pixar's production.
The open-source Alembic project brought standardization of
cached geometry interchange to the VFX industry; USD hopes to build on
Alembic's success, taking the next step of standardizing the
"algebra" by which assets are aggregated and refined in-context. Says
Guido Quaroni, VP of Software R&D at Pixar, "One of the key aspects of
Pixar's pipeline is the ability for hundreds of artists to operate
simultaneously on the same collections of assets in different contexts, using
separate 'layers' of data that are composited together at various production
stages. USD generalizes these concepts in an attempt to make them available to
any DCC application."
The USD distribution will include embeddable direct 3D visualization
provided by Pixar's modern GPU renderer, Hydra, as well as plugins for several key VFX DCCs, comprehensive
documentation, tutorials, and complete python bindings.
Pixar has already been sharing early USD snapshots with a
number of industry vendors and studios for evaluation, feedback, and advance
incorporation. Damien Fagnou, Global Head of VFX Operations for MPC Film,
relates, "USD is an amazing opportunity for both software vendors and VFX
companies; this type of common open standard drives the industry to greater
innovation by focusing development and leveraging a wide community of artists
and developers. We have been working with Pixar to evaluate USD since the
beginning of the year and plan to use it as a key part of our future VFX
pipeline.”
Jeff Clifford, Head of R&D for Double Negative,
states, "Over the past 12 months, Double Negative have converted
many large environment assets from our proprietary system over to USD for
testing and more recently have been using the USD
viewer successfully in production. Going forward we are
hoping a dedicated team can help test and develop USD to cater for all our
scene description needs, including our cross-studio collaborations."
Among the vendors helping to evaluate USD are The Foundry
and Fabric Software. Andy Lomas, Product Manager of Katana, says, "At The
Foundry we believe that USD will have a huge impact, and deserves to become an
industry standard similar to OpenEXR and OpenSubdiv. It is an ideal format
for creating rich assets that will work naturally with Katana, allowing
workflows that were previously only available to large studios using
proprietary tools. We consider that it is exactly what is needed to enable a scalable
collaborative pipeline, allowing the best in class tools to be used for each
part of the production process."
VP Product, Fabric Software, Kevin Tureski, states “USD
perfectly complements Fabric Engine by handling complex scene data in an
application-agnostic fashion. The design of the USD API made it straightforward
for us to integrate it directly into Fabric Engine and we already have customers
testing the combination.”
More information about USD can be found at the official
website: openusd.org