
Pixar's Universal Scene Description - gdubs
http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/
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drawkbox
Proprietary 3d formats is still a pretty big problem, anything that helps that
is good.

COLLADA tried to help that but formats like FBX have won out even though they
are proprietary, bloated, binary and not well documented because one company
(Autodesk) has no desire to improve interoperability since they own all 3d
platforms essentially.

There really should be more standardization in 3d by now, this probably came
out of necessity for Pixar. This takes it a bit further with full scene
descriptions rather than just individual assets.

I have a feeling WebGL will do the most for pushing standardizing of 3d
formats/objects/scenes over time as there is little efforts elsewhere. I
actually hope with Unity, as big as they are, would help this front as they
are sort of doing for animation with mecanim although still proprietary.

~~~
heliotron
It's disappointing that Autodesk seems to have eaten everything, but does
WebGL necessarily help to standardise any sort of 3D asset format?

The (few, simple) WebGL examples I've looked at seem to use JSON to transport
the assets from the server to the browser, but the particular representation
used is apparently arbitrary.

I admit I'm thinking by analogy, I don't see OpenGL itself having helped
standardise asset formats, so I'm wondering if WebGL is different here.

~~~
flohofwoe
There's a new Khronos project glTF which wants to establish a standardized
run-time file format for 3D assets:
[http://www.khronos.org/gltf](http://www.khronos.org/gltf), geometry is stored
in binary blobs so they can be dumped directly into buffer objects, and the
scene description is in JSON for simple (and somewhat fast) parsing. Unlike
FBX or COLLADA this is meant as an "engine file format", not as asset exchange
format between 3D packages.

~~~
bhouston
glTF seems nice. We are currently adding export support for glTF it to our
tool - [http://clara.io](http://clara.io). glTF is very similar to the run-
time format used by both [http://Verold.com](http://Verold.com) and
[http://Sketchfab.com](http://Sketchfab.com) but it is standardized.

glTF is basd on Collada pretty closely I understand.

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bhouston
This is nice addition (as in complimentary) to the Alembic format, see here:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alembic_(Computer_Graphics)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alembic_\(Computer_Graphics\))

In high end visual effects should should be quite useful. Just to be clear, it
isn't intended for games or real-time 3D graphics. It is designed for huge
complex scenes where one wants to have delayed loading and renderer
integrations.

I have been hearing about this for some time.

It isn't clear how quickly this will be embraced by 3D content creation
vendors as it can significantly increase interoperability and reduce lock-in.

Here is the overview of the format and motiviation:

[http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/overview.html](http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/overview.html)

~~~
berkut
I wouldn't call it an "addition" exactly.... It could be used in conjunction
with it, as the overview points out, with the Abc files being used as the leaf
nodes for the actual geometry representation.

But the SceneGraph representation (USD) will need to be the starting point, as
Alembic doesn't (yet) provide a nice way of doing overrides or referencing
other external files which is what this spec provides.

~~~
bhouston
I meant "addition" in the sense of a complimentary tool set to Alembic. :) But
you are right that it can be misinterpreted.

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berkut
It should be noted that this is designed for _huge_ production scenes, with
lots of overrides of attributes down the SceneGraph and lots of referencing.

This is not a replacement for FBX or other object interchange formats - it's
for entire scenes.

Most big VFX studios will already have their own version of this already in
use. What's interesting is it's Pixar pushing this, who don't tend to work
with other VFX studios on sharing assets and shots.

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Corrado
Is this something that POVray could use? I enjoy playing around with POVray a
bit but it would be cool to have a standard language to move between small,
consumer oriented tools.

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malandrew
For someone not from the world of 3D rendering and animation, can someone
please explain in layman's terms exactly what a scene description format does
beyond the obvious?

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berkut
USD being used in Katana:
[https://vimeo.com/76739820](https://vimeo.com/76739820)

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malkia
The pdf mentions Ogawa as possible replacement for BDB (BerkeleyDB) - anyone
knows what it is?

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bhouston
Ogawa is a new multithreaded binary backend for the Alembic file format. I
wrote about Ogawa here:

[http://exocortex.com/blog/alembic_is_about_to_get_really_fas...](http://exocortex.com/blog/alembic_is_about_to_get_really_fast)

