Pixar releases Universal Scene Description to open source; includes Hydra previewer

[Carlosan]

USD simplifies 3D data exchange within digital content workflows; includes Hydra previewer.

Pixar Animation Studios has released its Universal Scene Description (USD) technology, used for the interchange of 3D graphics data through various digital content creation (DCC) tools, as open source. USD is a proven effective and scalable data exchange solution for the complex workflows of CG film and game industry studios.

With the initial release today, Pixar is opening up its development process and providing code used internally at the studio. “USD synthesizes years of engineering aimed at integrating collaborative production workflows that demand a constantly growing number of software packages,” says Guido Quaroni, Vice President of Software Research and Development at Pixar.

Universal Scene Description is designed to coordinate use of the many separate elements that make up a scene. (Source: Disney/Pixar)

Pipelines capable of producing computer graphics films and games typically generate, store, and transmit great quantities of 3D data, which we call “scene description”.  Each of many cooperating applications in the pipeline  (modeling, shading, animation, lighting, fx, rendering) typically has its own special form of scene description tailored to the specific needs and workflows of the application, and neither readable nor editable by any other application.   Universal Scene Description (USD) is the first publicly available software that addresses the need to robustly and scalably interchange and augment arbitrary 3D scenes that may be composed from many elemental assets.  

USD provides for interchange of elemental assets (e.g. models) or animations.  Unlike other interchange packages, USD also enables assembly and organization of any number of assets into virtual sets, scenes, and shots, transmits them from application to application, and non-destructively edits them (as overrides), with a single, consistent API, in a single scene graph. USD provides a toolset for reading, writing, editing, and rapidly previewing 3D geometry and shading.  In addition, because USD’s core scene graph and “composition engine” are agnostic of 3D, Pixar says USD can be extended in a maintainable way to encode and compose data in other domains.