NVIDIA, Apple, Adobe, Pixar And Autodesk Team Up For An Open Source 3D Alliance
I am not a digital artist, but am a PC gamer, and like so many others I've tried my hand (with varying levels of success) at modifying my favorite games. One of the biggest pains when making game mods is dealing with format conversions, especially for 3D models and animations. Throughout the decades there have been countless formats for representing 3D model, scene, and animation data, and the exact format any given game requires might be esoteric, arcane, or downright proprietary.
How do we avoid this kind of mess? Through free and open standards. That's exactly what we have now for 3D scene data with the OpenUSD standard put forth originally by Pixar and now, by the Alliance for OpenUSD, or AOUSD for short. AOUSD is a new group composed of companies like Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA and hosted by Linux Foundation's Joint Development Foundation group. It seeks to promote the usage and adoption of the OpenUSD format by developers working with 3D scene data.
So what is OpenUSD? In AOUSD's own words, OpenUSD is "a high-performance 3D scene description technology." In other (admittedly reductive) words, it's a file format for 3D scenes. It's incredibly powerful, though—not only does it contain the usual data like 3D geometry, animation skeletons, and materials descriptors, but it's highly-extensible, and can store physical, mechanical, and electrical properties of objects too.
It's this extensible nature that makes AOUSD the perfect format not only for pre-rendered video content like films and television, but also for CAD applications, virtual reality and "metaverse" work (like NVIDIA's Omniverse and its "digital twins"), as well as, of course, for video games. While this announcement comes from AOUSD, both Epic Games—creators of the Unreal Engine—as well as Unity Weta Tools have weighed in on the alliance with generally-positive words.
Linux is kind of a big deal, as you may know, and the support of the Linux Foundation could see OpenUSD become established in the future as a proper ISO standard. If that happens, you can expect to see OpenUSD become the de facto standard for 3D scene data across essentially every application. Of course, it looks like that's already happening given the broad range of support for the format in just about everything.
