All: if you want to argue about what "USD" means, please do that at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36962507">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36962507</a>, not here. But also consider: "<i>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. [...] name collisions [...]. They're too common to be interesting.</i>" - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>
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.<p>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!)<p>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.
Does anyone remember X3D[1] / VRML? X3D is roughly the same concept, 20-some years ago.<p>Here's a hello world for X3D:
<a href="https://www.web3d.org/x3d/content/examples/Basic/X3dSpecifications/RedSphereBlueBoxIndex.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.web3d.org/x3d/content/examples/Basic/X3dSpecific...</a><p>And here's a hello world for OpenUSD:
<a href="https://www.openusd.org/release/tut_helloworld.html#viewing-and-editing-usd-file-contents" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.openusd.org/release/tut_helloworld.html#viewing-...</a><p>Although X3D is a bit more verbose, a lot of parallels can be drawn between the two, 20 years apart.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3D" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3D</a>
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.<p>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.
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).
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.<p>I feel like there's never been a 3D counterpart to standards like Midi for audio.
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?
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: <a href="https://twitter.com/mrdoob/status/1654494500230778887" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/mrdoob/status/1654494500230778887</a>
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.
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?
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?<p>There should be several hundreds active corporate alliances now.
For people complaining about the name, USD has been already a thing publicly since at least 2013, and internally probably fair bit before that: <a href="https://www.cgchannel.com/2013/10/pixars-usd-system-the-new-super-alembic/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cgchannel.com/2013/10/pixars-usd-system-the-new-...</a><p>I did also happen to find small comment about the name from an interview:<p>> 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.<p><a href="https://cesium.com/open-metaverse-podcast/the-genesis-of-usd/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://cesium.com/open-metaverse-podcast/the-genesis-of-usd...</a>
Why have they created yet another alliance, isn't Khronos group which standardizes similar things(APIs, 3d model standards such as GlTF etc) enough?
This is pretty neat to see Apple involved in a standard. They don't like to back everything that comes along. What is <i>very</i> interesting though, is that Meta isn't involved. Maybe because they're backing another horse, namely OpenXR [0].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.khronos.org/openxr/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.khronos.org/openxr/</a>
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.
How is this different from Collada from Kronos group?
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA</a><p>They already made a universal scene description standard.
So, can we finally say a "JPEG" or "H.264-in-MP4" for 3D content is coming?<p>(I mean as a universally accepted format that just works everywhere, not literally a JPEG on H.264 inside a scene)
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.<p>Or maybe glTF and other interchange formats already satisfy that need.
I'll be genuinely surprised if Autodesk doesn't act like a bad actor w.r.t. an open format standard.<p>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.
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.<p>Official repo: [1]<p>Current Spec: [2]<p>WIP for DIN Spec release: [3]<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/mvrdevelopment/spec/">https://github.com/mvrdevelopment/spec/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/mvrdevelopment/spec/blob/main/mvr-spec.md">https://github.com/mvrdevelopment/spec/blob/main/mvr-spec.md</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/mvrdevelopment/spec/pull/153">https://github.com/mvrdevelopment/spec/pull/153</a>
Maybe it's a revolution, but I don't understand how one format can be all things to all types of users.<p>BIM requirements are very different to 3D graphics and animation requirements.
<i>The alliance will develop written specifications detailing the features of OpenUSD</i><p>Since its an existing standard hasn't this already been done, at least to a decent extent?
No Intel and AMD?<p>No thanks.<p>This is just a power play by all the companies most well known for lock-in and monopoly-like behavior.<p>This is not a good thing.
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.<p>I left <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36962294">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36962294</a> out because it has actual interesting information about the project.