AN FRANCISCO, Calif. —March 11, 2024—The Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), an organization dedicated to fostering the standardization, development, evolution, and growth of Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD), today announced the formation of a new Materials Working Group, a new Geometry Working Group, and a new collaboration with the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), as well as 8 new members.
New Materials Working Group Advances 3D Workflows for Look Development
The creation of AOUSD’s new Materials Working Group marks a significant milestone in the advancement of 3D workflows. Standardizing material definitions within OpenUSD will facilitate seamless collaboration for look development across multiple tools, applications, and renderers. This will be particularly welcome for industries that require the long-term stability guaranteed by a normative standard definition, allowing developers to use OpenUSD materials knowing they’ll work consistently and predictably across the ecosystem, and continue to do so in the future.
New Geometry Working Group to Standardize USD Surfaces, Shapes, and Volumes for Virtual & Physical Worlds
Building upon ongoing work in the Core Specification Working Group, the new Geometry Working Group will draft specifications for describing surfaces, shapes, and volumes in USD for both virtual and physical worlds. Additionally, this group will specify interoperability standards for CAD geometry data. All of these areas are critical to formalizing OpenUSD geometry specifications across industries. For media and entertainment, these specifications ensure that geometry modeled in one tool will look and behave the same in all other USD-compliant tools. For industrial, manufacturing, architecture, engineering, and construction use cases, the specifications are even more critical to ensure the reliability and longevity of designs and operational data defined by USD geometry as it behaves and interacts with humans, sensors, robots, and more in virtual and physical worlds.
AOUSD and Academy Software Foundation Collaborate on Advanced Solutions
The foundation for AOUSD’s new Materials Working Group is a new liaison relationship between AOUSD and the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), which will foster collaboration and communication across the foundations to better support the sharing of ideas. AOUSD working groups will collaborate with ASWF USD working groups on OpenUSD and on material interchange through ASWF’s MaterialX project. This unlocks the potential of OpenUSD empowering the motion picture communities to develop and deploy advanced solutions that drive the industry forward. Read more here.
“We are excited to see the continued growth of the open source ecosystem surrounding USD. The Academy Software Foundation is working with AOUSD to incorporate the ideas and techniques developed by our USD Working Group – that now counts more than 1000 participants. Also, many of our projects have joint activities with AOUSD, such as MaterialX and its OpenPBR shading model. The formalization of our relationship will facilitate cross-collaboration and communication, accelerating open source adoption and interoperability across the industry,” said David Morin, Executive Director of the Academy Software Foundation.
Latest OpenUSD Release to Enhance International Compatibility
Pixar, a key contributor to AOUSD, announced the release of OpenUSD v24.03. This introduces new features that enhance usability and compatibility across different platforms and applications, expanding to broader international user and market needs. In particular, the support for Unicode identifiers in OpenUSD v24.03 allows source data originating in non-Latin-based languages to be natively representable in USD content. Content creators and industrial stakeholders all over the world are now able to encode USD in their native languages. For an in-depth exploration of this release, see the full announcement here.
AOUSD Welcomes New Members
Demand for interoperability across 3D workflows continues to drive interest in the Alliance for OpenUSD across industries. AOUSD is proud to welcome 8 new general members: Ansys, Bright Machines, Intel, Maxon, Siemens, Trimble, Worley, and WPP. Learn more about becoming a member of AOUSD today.
Supporting Quotes from New Members:
“For over 50 years, Ansys has been at the forefront of innovation, empowering visionaries across various industries,” said Shane Emswiler, senior vice president of products at Ansys. “AOUSD shares our steadfast commitment to an open ecosystem approach that eliminates barriers to technological advancement. We are excited to be a part of this initiative and collaborate with other industry leaders to deliver the next generation of simulation, digital twins, and data management.”
“Bright Machines transforms how electronics are designed and manufactured, and advances quality standards across the entire manufacturing value chain,” said Bright Machines’ CEO and Executive Chairman, Lior Susan. “To realize our ambitious goals, we must redefine 3D across design and manufacturing – this is the reason we are thrilled to join AOUSD. OpenUSD’s comprehensive technology and platform will catalyze Design for Automated Assembly and enhance our clients’ New Product Introduction process through the ability to simulate new products quickly and adapt product assembly and disassembly in a virtual environment.”
“The growth of OpenUSD for 3D scene interoperability, construction, and parallelizing development pipelines is accelerating and reshaping the workflows for content creators and developers alike. Extending Intel’s long history of supporting standards development and open ecosystems, we are happy to announce joining the OpenUSD community to support and to deliver complete platform solutions that serve the communities building on USD.” – Rob Bruckner, Corporate VP and CTO of Client Platform and Definition (CPAD) at Intel
“Maxon is excited to join the Alliance for OpenUSD and work towards the goal of a common standard for 3D projects, making it easier for Cinema 4D and ZBrush artists to create content for use in a broad and growing ecosystem of tools, and for everyone to take advantage of Redshift for rendering,” said Maxon CTO Philip Losch. “USD aligns with Maxon’s longstanding belief in empowering artists through rich cross-product workflows, continuing our investment in interchange technologies like the extended 3D format support Cineware brings to Adobe After Effects and other hosts.”
“Siemens is joining AOUSD to help our customers take advantage of the strengths of USD across a variety of industrial applications. Adding support for the USD format to the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio of industrial software and integrating the JT standard with USD will extend USD to the broad ecosystem of JT users and Siemens customers,” said Joe Bohman, Executive Vice President, PLM Products, Siemens Digital Industries Software.
Trimble is thrilled to join AOUSD at this early stage and to support the community’s efforts to standardize OpenUSD,” said Aviad Almagor, vice president, Technology Innovation at Trimble. “Our goal is to help strengthen the OpenUSD ecosystem and democratize 3D, ensuring that all stakeholders benefit from the groundbreaking potential of sustainable and interoperable data standards.”
“At WPP, we recognise the potential of OpenUSD in revolutionising the landscape of creative software, production, generative AI and beyond. As the demand for interoperability across 3D workflows continues to shape the media and communications industry, we are excited to be the first in our sector to join the Alliance for OpenUSD as a key member alongside renowned global leaders in creative technology. Together with our partners in the Alliance, we will transform the way content is conceptualised, produced, and delivered, ultimately driving greater impact for our clients and their consumers.” – Stephan Pretorius, Chief Technology Officer, WPP
To learn more about AOUSD, join our members at GDC March 18-22 to hear about OpenUSD in game development. And, attend NVIDIA GTC, a global AI developer conference running March 18-21 in San Jose, Calif., for a panel featuring Alliance for OpenUSD steering committee members, OpenUSD sessions with leading companies across industries, and OpenUSD hands-on labs.
NVIDIA GTC sessions you don’t want to miss include:
- The Big Bang of Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD)
- Speakers: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, NVIDIA
- Digitalizing the World’s Largest Industries With OpenUSD and Generative AI
- Speakers: Amazon Robotics, Cesium, Jaguar Land Rover, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Siemens
- An Introduction to OpenUSD
- Speakers: NVIDIA If you found this article to be informative, you can explore more current metaverse news here, exclusives, interviews, and podcasts.
