The encyclopedia · Software & IT · Strategic decision · 2013–2016
Pixar open-sourced USD, and the 3D industry adopted it as its scene standard
Pixar released its scene-description tech in 2016; studios and tool vendors converged on it for 3D interchange.
Pixar Animation Studios
the move
VFX pipelines were tangled webs of proprietary scene formats, so Pixar built Universal Scene Description (USD): a scalable system for interchanging and composing complex 3D scenes, with layering, file referencing, variants and inheritance, plus the Hydra renderer for interactive preview. It was first presented at SIGGRAPH 2013 and used in production on Finding Dory.
In August 2015 Pixar announced it would open-source USD; on July 26, 2016, it officially released the code. President Ed Catmull said sharing core technology was how the industry would keep innovating, and the release shipped with plugins for Autodesk Maya and The Foundry's Katana after early testing with ILM, MPC, Double Negative and Animal Logic.
ILM integrated USD's Hydra renderer into its virtual-production pipeline, and tool vendors committed to making USD the platform-independent scene representation of choice. The Foundry's Andy Lomas said USD 'deserves to become an industry standard similar to OpenEXR and OpenSubdiv' — the release made that convergence possible.
why it works
- Open-sourcing removed the fear of betting on one studio's proprietary format.
- Production-proven code from Finding Dory showed it could survive real films.
- Plugins for Maya and Katana gave vendors and studios an immediate integration path.
- ILM and other rivals testing the code built cross-industry trust.
what transfers
A company can turn its internal format into an industry standard by releasing it open, production-proven and with the integrations vendors already need.
what came after
USD became the de facto interchange format across VFX, animation and games; its code is developed in the open on GitHub, and Pixar, ILM, Autodesk and The Foundry all committed to it at release, with the project documentation and forum now serving a broad community of studios and tool makers.
references
- Pixar Animation Studios Open Sources Universal Scene Description
- Pixar open-sources its Universal Scene Description
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