Pixar 将 Universal Scene Description 开源

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将会在2016年夏天与大家见面！

Pixar has announced that it intends to make its Universal Scene Description software available open source.

First presented at Siggraph 2013, USD provides a standard format for exchanging complex VFX scene data – a kind of ‘super-Alembic’, effectively – plus embeddable visualisation via Pixar’s Hydra renderer.

A scalable, collaborative system for exchanging VFX scene dataWhereas Alembic enables studios or off-the-shelf software to exchange cached geometry in a standard format, USD goes further, being geared towards describing the structure of entire scenes rather than individual assets.

The system supports scene-composition features like layering, file-referencing, geometry and shading variants for individual assets, and inheritance.

Pixar describes USD as the marriage of the ‘composition engine’ from Presto, its animation software, to “lazy-access cached scene description”, with enhancements for scalability and modern multi-core systems.

Another core concept is the ability for multiple artists to work simultaneously on the same collections of assets, using seperate ‘layers’ of data that are then composited together.

The work is intended to be generalisable to any DCC application – Pixar has been collaborating with tools vendors including The Foundry and Fabric Software – and will come with plugins for “key VFX DCCs”.

The USD distribution will also include embeddable direct 3D visualization via Hydra, Pixar’s GPU renderer.

Already production-provenPixar has been using USD in production on upcoming animated feature Finding Dory for nearly a year, and the system is also being trialled at major VFX facilities including MPC and Double Negative.

“USD … deserves to become an industry standard similar to OpenEXR and OpenSubdiv,” said The Foundry’s Andy Lomas. “It is exactly what is needed to enable a scalable collaborative pipeline.”

AvailabilityUniversal Scene Description is due to be open-sourced by summer 2016. More details via the link below.

官网：http://openusd.org/