[HN Gopher] Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form allia...
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Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD
Author : anaclet0
Score : 287 points
Date : 2023-08-01 18:51 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
| pitaj wrote:
| Odd to see Nvidia and Apple working together on anything
| pier25 wrote:
| Both are also members of the Kronos group.
| [deleted]
| latchkey wrote:
| I'm more wondering where AMD is in this. "Open" isn't very open
| without all the major GPU players involved.
| jsheard wrote:
| AMD isn't directly involved with the alliance, but they have
| embraced USD
|
| https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-prorender _( "A
| Pixar(r) USD(tm) Hydra(tm) render delegate...")_
|
| https://gpuopen.com/learn/amd-usd-hydra-blender
| latchkey wrote:
| Good to know, thanks! Would be nice to see them join the
| standard too.
| hiidrew wrote:
| Unity and Epic seem like two glaringly omissions from this.
| colinthompson wrote:
| 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 Weta 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
| jsheard wrote:
| 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.
| treyd wrote:
| As well as the Blender Foundation.
| fgeahfeaha wrote:
| Game engines usually have their own runtime formats and just
| have an importer
| dagmx wrote:
| 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
| 9erdelta wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| Does anybody know if the Blender project is involved / working
| towards this in any capacity?
| erichocean wrote:
| 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.
| dagmx wrote:
| SideFX are a member. They're listed on the main site under
| General Members.
| [deleted]
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| They support USDZ (Blender includes support for USD export.[6]
| Import support from version 3.0. )
| dagmx wrote:
| 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.
| bssrdf wrote:
| Just finished writing [0] about Blender's USD import issue.
|
| [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36947946
| dagmx wrote:
| That improvement sounds great. Any chance that's up as a PR
| to blender?
| ruuda wrote:
| How does USD compare to Collada?
| Oarch wrote:
| 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.
| omershapira wrote:
| 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.
| pier25 wrote:
| Surprised to see Adobe here. Maybe they're working on some new 3D
| tools?
| rallyforthesun wrote:
| Adobe owns Substance, a material painting tool for 3d character
| and other assets, often used in game and movie industry
| pier25 wrote:
| But how is a texture/material generator related to a scene
| description standard?
| pixelesque wrote:
| Users will want to load USD scenes/models into Adobe
| products.
|
| Also, USD supports USDShade and MaterialX material (shader
| network) definitions, and I imagine there will be full
| round-tripping support for that?
| franzb wrote:
| Adobe makes many 3D tools that are able to import and
| export USD files. For instance, you could import a USD
| scene into Substance Painter, paint some objects and export
| it again in a lossless manner.
| franzb wrote:
| 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.
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| The have Aero and Substance 3D Apps
| https://www.adobe.com/products/aero.html
|
| https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/3d-ar.html
| elif wrote:
| 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.
| rallyforthesun wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This was my immediate thought. I reckon this will be one of the
| early steps in getting to automated movies.
| zgluck wrote:
| 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.
| franzb wrote:
| 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).
| [deleted]
| CodeCompost wrote:
| Doesn't the Linux Foundation take care of all that?
| LASR wrote:
| Reading between the lines, is Apple making moves in preparation
| for VisionPro?
| echelon wrote:
| Apple wants to own spatial computing. They've been building
| LIDAR into their phones for some time.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Only some of them.
| jsheard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| schoubey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Apple is currently in litigation with Khronos
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22538214
| [deleted]
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| How is this different from Collada from Kronos group?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA
|
| They already made a universal scene description standard.
| lattalayta wrote:
| 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
| caycep wrote:
| wait, Apple and Nvidia in the same room together?!
| CSMastermind wrote:
| 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.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Can someone ELI5 how this is different from glTF?
|
| What information does the OpenUSD format carry?
| beiller wrote:
| 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.
| avmich wrote:
| 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?
| jahewson wrote:
| 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.
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| 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.
| cobbal wrote:
| I suspect, but have no evidence, that it's the Maya side of
| AutoDesk
| LightFog wrote:
| 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.
| bsimpson wrote:
| When Pixar launched USD, the release included a Maya plugin.
| That's a totally reasonable assumption.
| epolanski wrote:
| 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.
| jsheard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What about glTF?
| jms55 wrote:
| glTF is actually pretty good. It just's fairly minimal and
| lacks support for an entire scene description, lacking
| important features such as LODs.
|
| Coincidentally, I help develop the Bevy game engine, and I
| was just talking to people about working on a bevy_usd
| library. From what they told me, USD is extremely
| complicated, and the "spec" is basically just the C++
| source code. I was warned not to bother. Imo it would be
| better if glTF just got more support and extensions.
| pixelesque wrote:
| glTF is really single-asset only: that's not what USD is -
| USD is designed for entire scenes with scene graph
| hierarchy, and layers of overrides / additions (it's
| essentially a mini-evaluation engine internally). It's very
| powerful, but also quite complicated, and not just a file
| format.
|
| USD started in the very complicated CG/VFX world where this
| type of complexity and flexibility is needed, however,
| Apple (and others) have been pushing it into other realms
| (VR, mobile, .usdz).
| jsheard wrote:
| They serve different roles, glTF is intended to be an asset
| delivery format that aligns with how GPUs work so it can be
| loaded onto one with fairly minimal overhead. USD is
| intended to be an interchange format for moving assets
| between editors and renderers. They're kind of analogous to
| JPG/PNG and PSD respectively, if PSD were an open standard.
|
| What Apple is doing with USD might have been better served
| by glTF, but glTF is a Khronos standard and Apple refuses
| to work with them for unspecified legal reasons.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > glTF is a Khronos standard and Apple refuses to work
| with them
|
| Given that Apple created OpenCL and handed it over to
| Khronos, this seems a bit off.
|
| > OpenCL was initially developed by Apple Inc., which
| holds trademark rights, and refined into an initial
| proposal in collaboration with technical teams at AMD,
| IBM, Qualcomm, Intel, and Nvidia. Apple submitted this
| initial proposal to the Khronos Group.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#History
|
| Apple just has a long history of working with Pixar. I
| think they've been using Pixar's USD as the basis for
| their AR asset file format since 2018.
|
| https://www.techrepublic.com/article/apples-usdz-ar-file-
| for...
| jsheard wrote:
| They _used_ to work with Khronos but things have
| developed since 2008 - Apple has completely abandoned
| OpenCL and OpenGL, won 't support Vulkan alongside Metal,
| and during the development of WebGPU one of their
| representatives let slip that there's a legal dispute
| blocking any further interaction between Apple and
| Khronos.
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F6ns6I3zs-2JL_dT9hOkX
| _25...
|
| _> Apple is not comfortable working under Khronos IP
| framework, because of dispute between Apple Legal &
| Khronos which is private. Can't talk about the substance
| of this dispute. Can't make any statement for Apple to
| agree to Khronos IP framework._
|
| Since the details of the dispute haven't come out it's
| unclear if it has been resolved yet, but regardless they
| don't seem to be on good terms.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Interesting. Thanks!
| erichocean wrote:
| > _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.
| xbiitx wrote:
| is this about stablecoin ?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Is this like HTML for 3D scenes?
|
| Sidenote- OpenUSD sounds like a crypto currency.
| khazhoux wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _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..
| zengid wrote:
| 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/
| jsheard wrote:
| OpenXR has absolutely nothing to do with 3D asset interchange,
| it's a standard for interfacing with VR/AR hardware.
| HPMOR wrote:
| 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.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| 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.
| rafaelturk wrote:
| USD: I thought this was instant payments initiative similar to
| Brazil's OpenPix...
| MAGZine wrote:
| 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.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Can I open an OpenUSD file in a text editor and read it?
| pixelesque wrote:
| 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.
| derefr wrote:
| > proper round-tripping of float values
|
| Why do so many (all?) textual data serialization formats
| represent floats in base-10 scientific notation, anyway?
|
| If we wanted floats that are 1. human-editable but 2.
| bijective with IEEE754, wouldn't floating-point
| _hexadecimal_ (with binary exponents) be a better idea?
| franzb wrote:
| Yes, absolutely.
| [deleted]
| omershapira wrote:
| 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.
| wilg wrote:
| Here is an example file for the curious: https://github.com
| /PixarAnimationStudios/OpenUSD/blob/releas...
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| khazhoux wrote:
| 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.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| Python's fork can be used to create children. Don't forget
| to kill them when you're done otherwise their memory can
| leak when they become zombies.
|
| _Trust me, it's about programming. Not snake horror
| dystopias._
| khazhoux wrote:
| I'll reply to your comment, but first I need to look into
| this dump I just took.
| whycome wrote:
| Any old BOB or RON can use USD as part of their work. I
| sometimes work with Autodesk and I, personally, prefer CAD.
| Don't let this RUB you the wrong way. Don't get MAD. Don't
| call a COP. Don't declare an SOS. For those that use PHP,
| consider SVC or plain old PEN.
|
| https://www.xe.com/iso4217.php
| serhack_ wrote:
| > Alliance to foster global collaboration for Universal Scene
| Description (USD)
|
| UNISD? UNIversal Scene Description
|
| At least better than Universal Scene Specific (USS)
| disillusioned wrote:
| 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.
| TylerE wrote:
| Then it sounds like AI.
| depereo wrote:
| Stable Diffusion isn't a familiar term outside a very
| niche audience. Probably over 50% of the earth's
| population is familiar with checking 'USD' exchange
| rates.
| TylerE wrote:
| This isn't something regular people care about though.
|
| People working in computer graphics absolutely know what
| stable diffusion is.
|
| I would also that at least a third of the US adult
| population doesn't know that USD is the abbreviation for
| symbol for US dollars. The average American never travels
| internationally.
| NavinF wrote:
| > at least a third of the US adult population doesn't
| know that USD is the abbreviation for symbol for US
| dollars
|
| If we're just gonna make up statistics...
| depereo wrote:
| Maybe regular _americans_. Africans, Europeans, Asians,
| Pacific peoples and Antipodeans however...
|
| The tech we buy is often USD-denominated and exchange
| risk is something we all deal with constantly for basic
| purchases, in business and personal life.
| bsimpson wrote:
| As an outsider, OpenSD sounds more like a disk format
| than anything to do with AI.
| khazhoux wrote:
| 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 also
| handle Euros, Pesos, Rupees, and 20 other currencies. The team
| was immediately fired, and went on to found Paypal.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| 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...
| throwaway104782 wrote:
| what a terrible name, I thought this was some kind of USD
| stablecoin
| jrflowers wrote:
| I am so glad that they picked an acronym so obvious so as to
| not confuse anyone.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Can someone clarify what the conversion ratio between OpenUSD
| and OpenEUR will be though?
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| ninepoints wrote:
| As someone in and out of the USD ecosystem for years
| (starting around 2014 or so), this comment is especially
| hilaruous.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Maybe this is the new anti-crypto meta - we proactively take
| away the best acronyms that the crypto community would want
| to use.
| theogravity wrote:
| I also thought this was crypto related and felt it was odd
| Adobe, Pixar, and Autodesk were involved.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah at first I thought it was some kind of store payment
| crypto they were introducing.
| therealmarv wrote:
| for a second I've thought they are creating a new crypto stable
| coin oO
| emmjay_ wrote:
| My dyslexic arse thought this read OpenBSD for a brief second.
| can16358p wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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.
| gyf304 wrote:
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| Not all surprising that X3D uses xml and of course OpenUSD uses
| some form of python/json thing
| khazhoux wrote:
| 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>
| dang wrote:
| 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
| zokier wrote:
| 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...
| wildpeaks wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Something is broken with your texcoords. The whole texture
| atlas is misaligned.
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