SideFX Solaris; USD Universal Scene Descriptor comes to Houdini

[L'Ancien Regime]

This looks pretty impressive...

SideFX is pleased to announce SideFX Solaris at SIGGRAPH 2019. This presentation was recorded on Tuesday July 30 at the Houdini HIVE in Los Angeles. Solaris brings a new context called LOPS, or lighting operators, that brings native USD [Universal Scene Description] support to Houdini to allow for comprehensive lookdev, layout and lighting workflows.

Geometry brought into LOPS becomes USD - USD remains USD while in LOPS.
Solaris provides a visual editor for working with USD.
Solaris supports a wide variety of lookdev, layout and lighting tasks.
Solaris is a new context in Houdini Core, Houdini FX, Houdini Indie and Houdini Apprentice - not a separate application.
A new USD-compliant renderer called SideFX Karma Render was announced for Solaris/USD 
This new renderer works with Hydra for fast IPR. 
This will be a fast CPU-based renderer with a GPU version of it being developed for a future release. 
Solaris also works with other Hydra-compliant renderers such as RenderMan.
Solaris is planned to be released as part of Houdini 18 in late 2019. Karma Render will be released in beta at the same time.

https://www.sidefx.com/community/sidefx-solaris/

 

http://www.cgchannel.com/2019/08/sidefx-unveils-solaris/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art)

 

What is USD?
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.  But unlike other interchange packages, USD also enables assembly and organization of any number of assets into virtual sets, scenes, and shots, transmit them from application to application, and non-destructively edit them (as overrides), with a single, consistent API, in a single scenegraph.  USD provides a rich toolset for reading, writing, editing, and rapidly previewing 3D geometry and shading.  In addition, because USD's core scenegraph and "composition engine" are agnostic of 3D, USD can be extended in a maintainable way to encode and compose data in other domains,

https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html