Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/08/pixar-adobe-apple-autodesk-and-nvidia-form-alliance-for-openusd/

by anaclet0 • 3 years ago

665 257 3 years ago

zgluck2• 3 years ago

Something I've always wondered about: All of these alliances for this and that format/standard/whatever - do they end up hiring some secretarial staff in some office for several decades?

There should be several hundreds active corporate alliances now.

CodeCompost• 3 years ago

Doesn't the Linux Foundation take care of all that?

franzb4• 3 years ago

As far as I know: no. It’s people like you and me from the involved companies that are largely responsible for moving things forward (most often in addition to their regular engineering work!) through Working Groups (WG) or Task Sub-Committees (TSC).

zgluck2• 3 years ago

Of course, but who's doing the actual admin work?

Who chases the sponsors for cash, who books the events, who collects the member fees, who creates that crappy member web site?

I'm just curious :)

MAGZine• 3 years ago

This is a big deal. I used to work at Autodesk, trying to build software that made 3D blueprints available to everyone, everywhere. Rendering things on mobile is hard, in part because you need to writer bespoke renderers, and in part because the data formats for the assets are not aligned.

Pixar developed USD, and it should really help to standardize 3D tech. In particular, I hope that USD can help make it easier to build high-performance rendering tech for a variety of applications that might not receive so much attention from the 3D graphics people (this is one thing video games do quite well, from a CS approach!)

Having some big names behind the standard should help, but of course, the proof will be in the pudding as to how meaningful their contributions are, and how much their involvement pushes the adoption of the standard.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

Can I open an OpenUSD file in a text editor and read it?

franzb4• 3 years ago

Yes, absolutely.

omershapira2• 3 years ago

OpenUSD has a plaintext encoding mode, which by convention gets saved as .usda. The standard OpenUSD SDK contains two command line utilities `usdcat` and `usdedit` to do plaintext editing, but most programs using the SDK have better editing functionality by directly using the C/Python SDK.

pixelesque5• 3 years ago

The ASCII (plain-text, .usda file extension version) absolutely.

For large scenes/models, the normal .usd binary/compressed version is often used for efficiency reasons (and proper round-tripping of float values for xforms, etc), but you can convert between the two with the 'usdcat' util and the python/c++ apis for debugging.

GoofballJones• 3 years ago

Yeah, sounds kind of like the old Renderman RIB files. Does Renderman still use RIB files?

I've been so out of the loop it's insane. I learned not long ago they no longer use the original Renderman Shading Language.

doctorpangloss2• 3 years ago

Rendering things on mobile is hard

I don't know. You can stream Unity to mobile with the service I've authored (https://appmana.com/watch/theheretic for an example).

esperent• 3 years ago

Looks nice. However the issue with all 3d streaming I've ever tried is latency. It's great if you're near the server. Terrible if you're far away.

It's hard so say what the input latency is for the head demo you shared. I guess about 100ms, which is totally fine for a mostly static scene with simple orbit controls.

However I also tried out the Lebron James vs Father Time game. Input latency is over 1 second so it's not playable. Any time I touch the screen it freezes for a second then jumps to the new location.

andsoitis• 3 years ago

with the service I've authored

You created Appmana?

weird-eye-issue2• 3 years ago

Yikes the performance is terrible. You are not proving the point that you think you are

andersa• 3 years ago

Cool, who is going to pay for it? This isn't rendering things on mobile.

froggit• 3 years ago

streaming != rendering

account422• 3 years ago

Cooking is hard.
Just order out bro.

knolan• 3 years ago

I’ve been happy with what modelviewer.dev offers me; someone with very little experience with 3D on the web. It’s basically a wrapper for three.js to view glTF files quickly and easily. It lets me load very small files and interact with them with JavaScript.

It’s perfect for my needs as an educator and I know just enough to be able to show other educators how to create and deploy their own learning materials.

zokier• 3 years ago

For people complaining about the name, USD has been already a thing publicly since at least 2013, and internally probably fair bit before that: https://www.cgchannel.com/2013/10/pixars-usd-system-the-new-...

I did also happen to find small comment about the name from an interview:

Just a little fun an anecdote, the original name ... And we were looking at the extension for the file. Technically when I do something that says layered scene description. But the extension LSD we thought it was a little too trippy, so we decided that we couldn't go in that route. So that's why the universal came, because it feels a little too far, but technically it was supposed to be a layered scene description. But anyway, we couldn't use that.

https://cesium.com/open-metaverse-podcast/the-genesis-of-usd...

pitaj• 3 years ago

Odd to see Nvidia and Apple working together on anything

pier253• 3 years ago

Both are also members of the Kronos group.

latchkey2• 3 years ago

I'm more wondering where AMD is in this. "Open" isn't very open without all the major GPU players involved.

jsheard8• 3 years ago

AMD isn't directly involved with the alliance, but they have embraced USD:

https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-prorender ("A Pixar® USD™ Hydra™ render delegate...")

https://gpuopen.com/learn/amd-usd-hydra-blender

hiidrew• 3 years ago

Unity and Epic seem like two glaringly omissions from this.

jsheard8• 3 years ago

Unreal already supports USD: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/universal-scene-desc...

USD has the most traction in the offline rendering world, but it's creeping into gamedev workflows too as a replacement for FBX.

namrog84• 3 years ago

I thought gltf or something was gaining traction to be the replacement for fbx in gamedev?

9erdelta• 3 years ago

Unity supports USD -- also Unity isn't technically a content creation tool (well...in the sense of what Adobe and Autodesk tools are). It is way bigger deal for the content creation tools to be aligning on an export format than consumers of said content (i.e. Unity) to align on importer.

colinthompson• 3 years ago

From the AOUSD website: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/aousd-quotes

“Unity is committed to the continued adoption of USD standards. AOUSD is an important step forward to delivering a common foundation for content creation, collaboration and interoperability. We are excited to be involved in the alliance and to help shape the future of USD.” - Allan Poore, Senior Vice President, Unity Wētā Tools

"Epic Games recognizes the significance of USD in establishing standards for 3D content, virtual worlds, and the open metaverse. Pixar has demonstrated exceptional leadership in the open source community over the last decade, and we are excited to witness the formation of the Alliance for OpenUSD, which will propel the technology to new levels of standardization." - Marc Petit, VP Unreal Engine Ecosystem, Epic Games

fgeahfeaha• 3 years ago

Game engines usually have their own runtime formats and just have an importer

zirgs• 3 years ago

It's fairly easy to load gltf at runtime in UE 4/5.

treyd• 3 years ago

As well as the Blender Foundation.

dagmx12• 3 years ago

Unity and Epic are both already members, just not at the founders level. The title lists the founders, but there's several more companies at the general level just a little bit lower down the aousd.org page

kriro• 3 years ago

USD is supported in Unreal engine. I'm using it in some projects, mostly for reinforcement learning scenario building sort of things.

dang2• 3 years ago

Stub 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.

dyingkneepad• 3 years ago

OpenUSD sounds like something bitcoin-related. The USD acronym is so known for being for US Dollars, why would they want to overload it...

jshreder• 3 years ago

Pixar has been using USD for years, OpenUSD is the rebranding of it as an open format.

Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) is an extensible framework and ecosystem for describing, composing, simulating, and collaborating within 3D worlds. Originally developed by Pixar Animation Studios, USD, also referred to as OpenUSD, is more than a file format. It’s an open-source 3D scene description used for 3D content creation and interchange among different tools. [1]

[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/usd

ninepoints2• 3 years ago

As someone in and out of the USD ecosystem for years (starting around 2014 or so), this comment is especially hilaruous.

jimbob45• 3 years ago

Maybe this is the new anti-crypto meta - we proactively take away the best acronyms that the crypto community would want to use.

theogravity• 3 years ago

I also thought this was crypto related and felt it was odd Adobe, Pixar, and Autodesk were involved.

therealmarv• 3 years ago

for a second I've thought they are creating a new crypto stable coin oO

serhack_• 3 years ago

Alliance to foster global collaboration for Universal Scene Description (USD)

UNISD? UNIversal Scene Description

At least better than Universal Scene Specific (USS)

disillusioned• 3 years ago

Even just OpenSD would be a vast improvement. Presume the "open" replaces "universal" (which isn't a 1:1 mapping, but still works as a branding exercise) and you DON'T have what literally 100% of the non-graphic-artist HN commentariat thought: that they're weirdly doing a stablecoin.

throwaway104782• 3 years ago

what a terrible name, I thought this was some kind of USD stablecoin

jrflowers• 3 years ago

I am so glad that they picked an acronym so obvious so as to not confuse anyone.

moffkalast2• 3 years ago

Can someone clarify what the conversion ratio between OpenUSD and OpenEUR will be though?

codyb• 3 years ago

I doubt the name's an issue cause acronyms and names are reused all the time and this is a pretty specialized area (3D content rendering).

Everyone working in 3D content rendering will know what OpenUSD is, and then whenever it gets exposed to broader audiences, we'll get small confusion from people who don't work in 3D rendering.

TacticalCoder• 3 years ago

For people complaining about the name, USD has been already a thing publicly since at least 2013

As opposed to the United States dollar that became public after 2013?

I mean, seriously: OpenUSD sounds like a cryptocurrency "stablecoin" token name.

khazhoux5• 3 years ago

Literally no one who uses USD as part of their work gets tripped up by this.

It’s ok for jargon and acronyms to be confusing to people who are not at all in the field.

gjsman-1000• 3 years ago

Seems to me that there is no shortage of better names available.

It's so easy to fix... why not call it, say, a "Universal Scene Description Package" (USDP) or a "3D Scene Description" (3DSD) or "Layered Universal Scene Description" (LUSD) or "Modern Scene Description Format" (MSDF) or "Universal Scene Description Format" (USDF) or "Kronos Scene Description" (KSD) or "Kronos Universal Scene Description" (KUSD) or...

rafaelturk• 3 years ago

USD: I thought this was instant payments initiative similar to Brazil's OpenPix...

khazhoux5• 3 years ago

When Toy Story 3 was almost finished in 2010, they needed to convert some assets from Toy Story 1. Ed Catmull called an urgent meeting and instructed the software team to write a USD converter. The team came back 3 weeks later and demo'd their new USD converter, which they proudly announced could handle Euros, Pesos, Rupees, and 20 other currencies. The team was immediately fired, and went on to found Paypal.

emmjay_• 3 years ago

My dyslexic arse thought this read OpenBSD for a brief second.

xbiitx• 3 years ago

is this about stablecoin ?

Racing0461• 3 years ago

Sounds like a crypto coin at first.

tukajo2• 3 years ago

Wait, it's not?

tukajo2• 3 years ago

Why is the JDF (Japanese Defense Force) backing a new crypto coin (OpenUSD) with Apple, Pixar, Nvidia and Adobe?

johnalbertearle• 3 years ago

I am no longer into stuff like USD, and probably it is useful and a good thing. Adobe and Autodesk etc. will have an interchangeable structure. But I used to work for both of those companies indirectly and ..

They want closed systems as much as possible, only open standards etc. when forced to do so, because of course they want all the business and all the money. So USD probably good, but they will wield it against competitors (are there any anymore?) as much as possible.

IMNSHO. Sorry where it offends.

savolai• 3 years ago

dang: This seems to have accidentally landed in the naming stub?

dumpsterdiver• 3 years ago

I came across a saying once that proved itself apt after a brief stint working for the government:

Always spell out acronyms upon first use in any discrete communication.

The reason this is so apt in government work is because workers become so familiar with lazily throwing around acronyms that they forget what those letters represent. I've witnessed first hand a person confidently throwing around acronyms as if they knew all about it, only to find out that they knew pretty much nothing about it aside from the letters that comprise the acronym.

In the fine article above, the acronym was clarified upon first use, and so all is well:

"Alliance to foster global collaboration for Universal Scene Description (USD)"

nottorp2• 3 years ago

Yes i'd like to complain. But then Apple is involved, and they don't test their devices outside a California air conditioned and dust free office anyway. Why would they test their names...

USD is the US Dollar currency everywhere. Even americans who have dabbled with forex know. Apparently though, no one in the management of 5 large american tech companies.

Will they sue every currency exchange shop in the world for using their acronym?

Edit: and how are they going to make their format popular when all search engines are just going to give them the currency converter pages?

sanitycheck• 3 years ago

If it's OK to just use acronyms that are already really just their own thing, I expect the next lot of technologies to come from these guys to be USA, USSR, NASA, NORAD, FBI, CIA, LOL, WTF, MILF and SNAFU.

waffletower3• 3 years ago

I am truly disappointed that these companies have not started an open-source alliance to counterfeit United States currency.

waffletower3• 3 years ago

Open Universal Scene Description -> ScenDes. If you must: Open Universal Scene Description -> OpenScenDes. Uttering "universal" whenever something is referenced is pretentious and unwieldy. Save the pretense for the press release. Naming is indeed hard for these people. Some products have a different problem -- where they are unusable as acronyms -- like this proto-name from Microsoft: "Azure Smart Spaces".

nektro• 3 years ago

OpenUSD is an atrocious name, thought big tech was getting together to make a crypto

can16358p• 3 years ago

So, 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)

CharlesW• 3 years ago

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.

perilunar3• 3 years ago

Oddly enough, MP4 already includes a 3D content specification: MPEG-4 Part 11:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_11

dang2• 3 years ago

All: if you want to argue about what "USD" means, please do that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36962507, not here. But also consider: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. [...] name collisions [...]. They're too common to be interesting." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

pier253• 3 years ago

Surprised to see Adobe here. Maybe they're working on some new 3D tools?

rallyforthesun2• 3 years ago

Adobe owns Substance, a material painting tool for 3d character and other assets, often used in game and movie industry

pier253• 3 years ago

But how is a texture/material generator related to a scene description standard?

sammorrowdrums• 3 years ago

The have Aero and Substance 3D Apps https://www.adobe.com/products/aero.html

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/3d-ar.html

franzb4• 3 years ago

Adobe acquired Allegorithmic in 2019. Allegorithmic were the makers of Substance Designer, Substance Painter and many other 3D tools that are de facto standards for digital texturing. They’re _widely_ used in the video games, film and design industries (among others).

Disclaimer: I worked for Allegorithmic and now work for Adobe.

elif• 3 years ago

USD 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 becomes purely artistic in nature rather than a technical or organizational cost. There will be no downside for a 3D artist to tell the servers "render this scene, but generate a few different versions if you finish before I get back to work tomorrow" in the worst scenario it is electricity used, in the average scenario it can inspire new ideas, and in the ideal scenario it creates something usable.

rallyforthesun2• 3 years ago

nvidia uses usd as standardfileformat in its omniverse 3d suite. They are starting to integrate AI into it, for example to convert an image into a 3d scene.

rcarr• 3 years ago

This was my immediate thought. I reckon this will be one of the early steps in getting to automated movies.

flohofwoe• 3 years ago

but I think the biggest beneficiaries will be AI's

It's just another 3D file format, calm down ;)

There have been quite a few "standard" 3D file formats in the last 30 years (COLLADA, FBX, glTF, to name a few of the more popular ones, check here for a more complete list: https://github.com/assimp/assimp/tree/master/code/AssetLib), USD isn't anything special except that Apple is involved (which means you probably shouldn't put too much hope into the "Open" prefix, or at least expect that Apple jumps ship as soon as the first cracks start to show in the "alliance").

ferrumfist• 3 years ago

It's a standardized file that describes a 3D scene (with references to assets, transforms, etc). It makes asset pipelines easier to spin up and iterate on, but I don't think anything about USD specifically will further enable AI art projects more than they actually do.

janosdebugs• 3 years ago

I don't think we'll have 3D AI art anytime soon. Most if not all AI for 2D works on a pixel basis. 3D is more like SVG, except there is a whole third dimension to contend with. There are AIs that manage to produce SVGs, but I have yet to see a clean one where the objects are actually properly grouped and not just a bunch of random shapes thrown together to do a vector approximation of pixels.

If anyone finds an AI that can do reasonable SVGs, please do let me know.

LASR• 3 years ago

Reading between the lines, is Apple making moves in preparation for VisionPro?

echelon• 3 years ago

Apple wants to own spatial computing. They've been building LIDAR into their phones for some time.

stalfosknight• 3 years ago

Only some of them.

jsheard8• 3 years ago

It's pretty explicit at this point, the visionOS AR app model is centered around handing off content to a centralized renderer provided by Apple, and they've settled on USD and MaterialX as the ingest formats for that renderer.

llm_nerd• 3 years ago

Apple worked with Pixar on USZD back in 2018 (making a file format around USD). This initiative is simply making an open consortium to guide the evolution of USD.

Apple has been preparing for the VisionPro for a long time. LIDAR makes zero sense on a smartphone, but was foundational. ARKit was foundational. A lot of their scene technologies were clearly targeting a headset, and smartphones were just a temporary kickoff.

avmich• 3 years ago

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?

cobbal• 3 years ago

I suspect, but have no evidence, that it's the Maya side of AutoDesk

LightFog• 3 years ago

I doubt it - for 3D CAD there are STEP/IGES etc. Most of the 3D printing issues are from triangulation/voxelization of analytical surfaces rather than interchange format.

bsimpson2• 3 years ago

When Pixar launched USD, the release included a Maya plugin. That's a totally reasonable assumption.

jahewson2• 3 years ago

For professional CAD/CAM use cases? No. Those do not use meshes but more sophisticated and computationally expensive 3D modelling techniques. For hobby use? Sure. Most of that stuff uses meshes already.

Edit: it’s actually not just meshes that are supported. But the usual CAD/CAM surfaces are still not supported.

gibsonf1• 3 years ago

With a brief look at the example, it looks like they represent form with formulas instead of meshes, enabling fabrication from the form, for example. This is one of the reasons BIM software like Revit is so unhelpful for fabrication as they don't use formulas to represent the form so you can't get high enough accuracy.

danwills4• 3 years ago

I don't think it's gonna help with the design side of things but USD does include a volume primitive type in its 'UsdVol' section:

https://openusd.org/release/api/usd_vol_page_front.html

So it sounds like it could be possible to use USD to convey data to a 3D printer eventually once the printers have loaders for the new format.

fsloth• 3 years ago

Autodesk is huge in ’visual’ pipelines that are not directly related to engineering. Maya etc.

This is very litle about manufacturing, except you can of course always convert a model to 3D mesh for visualization etc. That is quite common, and in that workflow usd is as good as any other ’mesh plus material’ format.

The output of engineering design software usually is: 1) Shop drawings for building the whole thing or sub-assembly 2) CNC machine compatible presentation 3) 3D meshes for visualization 4) conversion to some other engineering format

You can always more or less export a 3D mesh, wich can then be 3D printed. So - printing, yes. But adds nothing to any other visua format in that workflow (stl,obj,…).

epolanski• 3 years ago

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.

jsheard8• 3 years ago

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.

OmarShehata• 3 years ago

What about glTF?

erichocean3• 3 years ago

what does OpenUSD provides exactly over different formats

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.

Keyframe• 3 years ago

Pretty much a next-gen RIB. FBX itself was always weird child ever since Kaydara days (untill bought by Autodesk).

mrguyorama• 3 years ago

IMO the equivalent to Midi files in the 3D world is OBJ files. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavefront_.obj_file

It's just a simple text file but it supports 3D objects and materials and is supported by pretty much everything. A complete novice can write code to generate it.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

Is this like HTML for 3D scenes?

Sidenote- OpenUSD sounds like a crypto currency.

khazhoux5• 3 years ago

No, because HTML is semantic (rendering is open to interpretation) whereas USD is explicit.

But in terms of "common format which different systems can read", then yes, sure.

petercooper• 3 years ago

Sidenote- OpenUSD sounds like a crypto currency.

This is exactly what I thought at first too. But then realized it's August 1st and not April..

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

No Intel and AMD?

No thanks.

This is just a power play by all the companies most well known for lock-in and monopoly-like behavior.

This is not a good thing.

pjmlp4• 3 years ago

As if Intel and AMD don't have lock-in and monopoly-like behavior of their own.

dagmx12• 3 years ago

As with many joint development groups, there’s ongoing membership inductions. Intel or AMD may join in the future. The initial set of companies isn’t representative of anything other than who founded it.

coldtea2• 3 years ago

Does anybody know if the Blender project is involved / working towards this in any capacity?

erichocean3• 3 years ago

Blender has USD support, but I think it would be difficult for them to contribute to OpenUSD directly. They're more of an "downstream user".

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.

dagmx12• 3 years ago

SideFX are a member. They’re listed on the main site under General Members.

zitterbewegung• 3 years ago

They support USDZ (Blender includes support for USD export.[6] Import support from version 3.0. )

dagmx12• 3 years ago

Blender could in theory join the Alliance, but a lot of the companies in the Alliance do already contribute for USD support in Blender as well as other features. NVIDIA and Apple do quite a bit.

bssrdf5• 3 years ago

Just finished writing [0] about Blender's USD import issue.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36947946

dagmx12• 3 years ago

That improvement sounds great. Any chance that’s up as a PR to blender?

Vt71fcAqt7• 3 years ago

This was a great read, thanks for sharing.

panzi2• 3 years ago

Interesting. Since the list is sorted, is the insertion still a linear search (O(N)) or now a binary search (O(log(N))? Or did I misunderstand something? Also, why is it not a hash table (almost O(1))?

coldtea2• 3 years ago

Wow, thanks!

TheMagicHorsey• 3 years ago

How is this different from Collada from Kronos group? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA

They already made a universal scene description standard.

lattalayta• 3 years ago

From the Collada wiki page: Initial release October 2004; 18 years ago Latest release 1.5.0 August 2008; 14 years ago

USD has more layering and referencing capabilities

ruuda• 3 years ago

How does USD compare to Collada?

Oarch• 3 years ago

Maybe 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.

omershapira2• 3 years ago

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.

caycep• 3 years ago

wait, Apple and Nvidia in the same room together?!

PoignardAzur• 3 years ago

Can someone ELI5 how this is different from glTF?

What information does the OpenUSD format carry?

beiller• 3 years ago

USD is at a higher level of abstraction than gltf (IMO). It was created to ease things such as scene graph LOD (levels of detail) for example. It's made for very large scenes. It was created as a file format to exchange very large scenes for 3d animated movies. Inside of a USD file you can point to many other files, for example GLTF, OBJ files etc.

It seems like a great format so far, but I'm skeptical based on Adobe, Apple, Autodesk track records for "open" formats.

dagw2• 3 years ago

Quoting from the USD homepage:

"Well-known file formats for interchange in the VFX industry like OBJ, FBX, and Alembic primarily deal with interchanging flat/cached geometry, with no facility for assembling assets or editing the data directly. USD does serve the role of an “interchange file format,” more comprehensively than previous public efforts, because it already interchanges not only geometry, but also shading/materials, lights, rendering, linear-blend skinning and blend-shape animation, rigid body physics, and is extensible along numerous axes."

zengid• 3 years ago

This 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/

HPMOR• 3 years ago

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.

schoubey• 3 years ago

Why have they created yet another alliance, isn't Khronos group which standardizes similar things(APIs, 3d model standards such as GlTF etc) enough?

thrillgore• 3 years ago

Apple is currently in litigation with Khronos https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22538214

cubefox3• 3 years ago

Seems indeed to compete with https://www.khronos.org/openxr/

CSMastermind• 3 years ago

Standardization is desperately needed here - Apple is out in the wilderness doing their own thing. Trying to import the USD files their software generates into other tools is a nightmare. Most people I see, my own team included, ends up writing a deserialization tool that just parses the raw data they generate because working with their wonky USD files is too much of an annoyance.

gyf304• 3 years ago

Does anyone remember X3D[1] / VRML? X3D is roughly the same concept, 20-some years ago.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3D

vxNsr• 3 years ago

Not all surprising that X3D uses xml and of course OpenUSD uses some form of python/json thing

khazhoux5• 3 years ago

I was tinkering in that space in the mid-90s, and always felt the file format was a missed opportunity, and wasn't taking any of the lessons of HTML.

What I wanted (but never built) was a semantic file format, something like:

    <room style="square" id="room1">
      <wall direction=north>
        <picture frame="modern" src="http://foo.com/fancycat.jpg" />
      </wall>
      <wall direction=south>
        <door room="room2" />
      </wall>
    </room>

sien• 3 years ago

There was a company in Sweden that built a system that used VRML and extended like that where you could define what the nodes were and reference and re-use them. The system also enable Python to script behaviour.

It also used the PHANToM for haptic feedback and used a 3D stereoscopic display

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-Reachin-Display-equipp...

The company H3D has built something similar.

https://h3d.org/

cubefox3• 3 years ago

That's way too high level and ambiguous. Something could look okay in one browser and totally crap in another.

JayStavis• 3 years ago

Sounds like you are looking for react-three-fiber, which looks just like this!

The examples, demos, and development experience are great, but since it's based on web tech hasn't made a big splash yet with the bigger 3D content businesses.

You can actually render a gltf as a JSX tree too with gltfjsx: https://github.com/pmndrs/gltfjsx

datavirtue2• 3 years ago

irrational• 3 years ago

I do remember VRML. I read a book about it and spent some time playing around with it in the mid-90s. I didn't follow it closely enough to know when it died off (I'm assuming it died off since I haven't heard it mentioned much in decades).

perilunar3• 3 years ago

VRML is still around — it became X3D. It's a different file format but the semantics are much the same.

All the plugins that used to be needed to display VRML online are gone now, but you can still display VRML 2.0/97 files online using JavaScript library called X_ITE [1]. I used it recently to view some old VRML I had saved but could no longer view. Works great.

1. https://create3000.github.io/x_ite/

bschwindHN• 3 years ago

I remember VRML. Unfortunately KiCAD still uses it for 3D models (though thankfully it supports STEP files too)

ComodoHacker• 3 years ago

We had to wait 20 years until some entity interested in interoperability became powerful enough that vendors started listening to them.

perilunar3• 3 years ago

X3D is roughly the same concept, 20-some years ago

That was my initial thought also.

Although X3D is a bit more verbose

The USDA file format reminds me a lot of the pre-XML VRML 97 file format, with the curly bracket C-style syntax, #comments, and 'def' everywhere.

https://openusd.org/release/spec_usdpreviewsurface.html#usd-...

wildpeaks• 3 years ago

I look forward to USD & USDZ being supported more consistently. The same file can look quite different even within the Apple ecosystem, as these screenshots from a few monthes ago show: https://twitter.com/mrdoob/status/1654494500230778887

meindnoch• 3 years ago

Something is broken with your texcoords. The whole texture atlas is misaligned.

bhouston2• 3 years ago

The issue is that Apple doesn't support multiple texture transforms per material, rather it only supports one.

dagmx12• 3 years ago

The issue actually turned out to be three.js itself in that case, so the poster himself was at fault. The way it writes out materials and texture coordinates was wrong because it doesn’t use the USD API.

Different apps had different tolerances for correctness leading to that mishmash.

That’s not to say USD support can’t be improved, but that post is actually a bad example.

bhouston2• 3 years ago

Are you sure?

Apple's USDZ viewer didn't support true independent second UV channels and multiple texture transforms per material, rather it makes a bunch of assumptions that are much more restrictive than the USD format.

That is why that example is messed up I understand.

For example these caveats which screw things up tremendously:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/realitykit/validat...

"RealityKit supports a single UV Set in iOS 15 and macOS 12. In iOS 16 and macOS 13, it supports two."

"RealityKit supports only a single packed texture per material. You can, however, reference multiple scalar channels within a single texture."

"RealityKit supports USD texture scaling except for normal map textures."

"RealityKit supports a single UsdTransform2d per material. If a material contains multiple UsdTransform2D instances, the renderer will use the first one it finds."

samplatt• 3 years ago

I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to seeing assets distributed in USDZ format. Specifically: nuts.

danwills4• 3 years ago

I find it slightly odd that SideFX aren't part of this. They have worked very closely with Pixar on integrating USD into Houdini in a new subsystem/type of network called 'Solaris' / Lops. It is a very deep and powerful integration too: You can edit USD data using the Python Lop (pxr.Usd API) or even with Vex/Vops (a SIMD-focused language that can be 'written' using 'Vop' nodes that compiles to bytecode and runs (fast) on LLVM.) Makes sense considering how much Houdini gets used to create assets (including at Pixar and for many AAA games as well.) Hopefully the alliance don't make things harder for Solaris! (Autodesk is a direct competitor because of Maya).

danwills4• 3 years ago

Ah, I see SideFX are there as a "General Member"! Cool!

agumonkey• 3 years ago

pretty cool indeed

long live sidefx

lvncelot• 3 years ago

Solaris (in Houdini 18 I think?) was my introduction to USD and a pretty deep rabbit hole for a few weeks.

Although its functionality is way beyond a solo hobbyist's needs, the whole time I was thinking about how cool it is to have a standardized format, and how much it must benefit teams working together on a project.

serf• 3 years ago

I'll be genuinely surprised if Autodesk doesn't act like a bad actor w.r.t. an open format standard.

It doesn't fit their displayed principles/ethics/concept/mission from the past 30 years whatsoever, so i'm probably just not clever enough to see what their scheme is yet.

cubefox3• 3 years ago

Didn't Meta and a few others propose something similar a few months ago?

rkagerer• 3 years ago

The alliance will develop written specifications detailing the features of OpenUSD

Since its an existing standard hasn't this already been done, at least to a decent extent?

dagmx12• 3 years ago

No, there is an implementation but not a formal specification.

Albeit parts of the implementation are well defined enough that they are a good basis for a specification, many behaviour specifics are only existent in code.

A specification would need to be implementation independent.

th0ughtcr1me• 3 years ago

timely

pnw2• 3 years ago

I spent a ton of time in 2022 looking for people adopting USD for game development and came up with nada. It's popular in vfx but nobody in gaming seems to be adopting it in any way I could find. Has that changed since?

joeyrideout• 3 years ago

RealityKit (iOS & visionOS AR/VR/3D library) makes use of USD. Native apps and games for the Vision Pro will also use USD, alongside their new implementation of Entity Component System (ECS).

ladberg• 3 years ago

Yes, but using .reality files is better for stuff like games in RealityKit. For example it would contain a GPU-ready texture instead of a jpeg (and a lot of other differences), so it's more in-line with how assets are typically loaded in games.

jsheard8• 3 years ago

It's early days for USD in gamedev, but Remedy is using it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI2pyzTOvaQ

pnw2• 3 years ago

Interesting find, thanks!

ninepoints2• 3 years ago

USD isn't usable as a last-mile format, so many game engines still use internal formats that facilitate fast edit-time to last-mile format conversion and compression, mainly as a point of pragmatism. There is some slow adoption of USD, but given that the main drivers of the format are from VFX, it's understandable that it will take some time for game devs to embrace USD fully.

raincole2• 3 years ago

USD and FBX/glTF serve very different purposes and can't replace each other.

asutekku• 3 years ago

Epic has started the work to implement it into Unreal Engine and various tools have started adopting it as well. All this within the last two years or so

edflsafoiewq• 3 years ago

What would you use USD for in gamedev?

gjvc• 3 years ago

name collisions "They're too common to be interesting"

bullshit

pbreit• 3 years ago

I thought this was going to be some sort of US Dollar-based stable coin. Interesting naming.

itishappy2• 3 years ago

Pixar started work on the Universal Scene Descriptor format in 2012. [0]

Larimer theorized bitUSD in 2013. [1]

[0] https://openusd.org/release/intro.html#heritage-of-usd-at-pi...

[1] https://www.steem.center/index.php?title=BitShares:Proposal_...

knapcio• 3 years ago

I find that my confusion primarily arises from the utilization of "USD", an abbreviation denoting the United States Dollar which exists since 1792 :)

rasz• 3 years ago

I remember when Jobs was introducing later version of Next he was asked about lack of OpenGL support and replied that Next will use Pixar developed scene description 'something' (already had some early shaders, maybe used by renderman?). You could say Pixar has been preparing for this for almost 40 years :)

there it is https://allaboutstevejobs.com/videos/misc/nextstep_3_demo_19...

"one of the other things that we've done with NeXTSTEP release 3.0 is we've actually built in some three dimensional graphics. We have built in Pixar's RenderMan photorealistic rendering software, which can produce the most photorealistic rendered images from 3D models. In addition to that, we've built in some real time 3D graphics, interactive RenderMan. We've taken photorealistic RenderMan and made a version that will run interactively on the screen."

OpenUSD is Steve Jobs laughing from the grave, once again he got his way.

diogenescynic• 3 years ago

I assumed this was some sort of stablecoin and was thoroughly confused.

habibur• 3 years ago

Anyone remembers VRML?

FrostKiwi• 3 years ago

How is this different from glTF? Are we getting another XKCD #927?

inconfident2021• 3 years ago

My only question, why aren't they using gltf? What is the issue with gltf? It supports most of the things?

strix_varius• 3 years ago

OpenUSD solves a very different problem than gltf.

pjmlp4• 3 years ago

It is yet another Khronos format, by committee, instead of something Hollywood designed for their workflows.

Additionally Gltf only became a thing thanks to Microsoft changes that originated Gltf 2.0. Initially it was designed as a format specifically for WebGL.

dagw2• 3 years ago

Quoting from the the USD homepage:

Basically, glft is primarily designed for sharing individual 3D geometry, while USD is designed for sharing whole 3D scenes and is designed in a way that lots of different departments can collaborate on different parts of the same scene at the same time.

gdtfmaster• 3 years ago

For entertainment, there has been MVR - My Virtual Rig - specification. The My Virtual Rig file format allows programs to share data and geometry of a scene for the entertainment industry.

Official repo: [1]

Current Spec: [2]

WIP for DIN Spec release: [3]

[1] https://github.com/mvrdevelopment/spec/

[2] https://github.com/mvrdevelopment/spec/blob/main/mvr-spec.md

[3] https://github.com/mvrdevelopment/spec/pull/153

TigerTeamX• 3 years ago

Standards are good, but I am a little weary about this. Is this another embrace, extend, extinguish moment?

nottorp2• 3 years ago

Currency hijack aside, will this be usable without paying royalties? Adobe and Autodesk are involved...

hospitalJail• 3 years ago

What a list of anti-consumer companies. Natural allies. What are the odds that its Open, like OpenAI is open?

suierklepye• 3 years ago

The fact that these major players in the industry are joining forces to develop a common platform for sharing and editing 3D content is a testament to the importance of collaboration and interoperability in today's creative landscape.

kaveh808• 3 years ago

USD is very complex, mainly because it includes an interchange format as well as workflow features. I wonder if it would make sense to split the standard into layers to expand the target audience beyond the major production houses.

Or maybe glTF and other interchange formats already satisfy that need.

nightowl_games• 3 years ago

How does USD compare to gltf?

Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD

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