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Pixar's Universal Scene Description To Be Open-Sourced

Posted by samzenpus on from the try-it-out dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Today Pixar announced their second major open source project, Universal Scene Description. USD is the technology that enables 'hundreds of artists to operate simultaneously on the same collections of assets in different contexts', says Pixar VP of software R&D, Guido Quaroni. Pixar has been working with industry to vet the new technology, gaining backing from VFX power-houses MPC and Double Negative as well as high-end digital content creation tool creator, The Foundry. Official source release is slated for summer 2016. Pixar released its RenderMan animation and rendering suite, free back in March.

5 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. It will be taken down by a DMCA request. by the_other_one · · Score: 5, Funny

    Pixar is too close to Pixels.

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  2. Will this fill a gap in free software? by ciaran2014 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Does this software do something that the Blender devs currently can't do (and aren't making good progress on)? Will Blender celebrate this release?

    (Note: Renderman is still proprietary, it just costs nothing for a non-commercial licence. Not free software at all.)

    (Note #2: The announcement is their "intent" to release it as open source by summer 2016. Currently no code has been released and no licence can be read.)

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    1. Re:Will this fill a gap in free software? by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 2

      If they integrated this they would have a vastly improved reference management system. However, much of what this offers probably isn't terribly useful to your average Blender user so it would be a total waste of time and actually just a time waster for someone who works by themselves and doesn't reference or instance assets or needs to move assets between multiple content creation packages.

  3. Re:Nerdlinger by Wescotte · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm thinking git for artist.

  4. Re:COLLADA is an existing open exchange standard by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 2

    Collada doesn't to my knowledge support inheritance and overrides. So I can't have a Collada file that modifies another Collada file which modifies a third Collada file etc.

    The best comparison would be CSS vs straight HTML. With CSS you can have a style sheet that modifies a second style sheet which inherits a third style sheet which overrides the property of a fourth style sheet and so on and so forth. HTML you just have a page with markup.