How Pixar Unified 3D software?!!

before anyone dreamt of unifying through the software in production pipelines whether it being in animation game development or VFX the original motivation behind USD was rather a self-centered one which aimed to have Pixar make better movies which makes sense it was basically the company saying let's make life easier for us so good for them USD has been in development at Pixar Animation Studios with more than a 100 people who contributed to it throughout the years since 1995 the idea behind it was to build a f format that is capable of containing 3D models textures animations visual cameras and much more other stuff however it's not like other formats for reasons that we will discover in a minute but before that I need to give you a little bit of historical background USD was first implemented in Finding Dory in the 2016 sequel of the highly acclaimed finding Neo which was a great animated movie later that year it was published as an open source technology to allow everyone in the industry to benefit from it and to further develop it after this decision was encouraged by Pixar leadership including Jim Morris Steve may and ID catall the co-founder of Pixar and president of Walt Disney Animation Studios who actually stated we believe that being open with our technology and sharing it with our peers in the industry is how we can best continue to drive in ation okay now why USD well I mean couldn't it have been any other format so what makes this format so unique USD which stands for Universal scene description is a file format that can store and describe three-dimensional data such as models animations and so on and it has many aspects that make it different from others so let me explain USD has many features that make it a Powerhouse of a format to transfer 3D content which fixes many of the problems that Productions face in terms of their workflow the first thing that we should be aware of is its composition engine which allows us to non-destructively assemble 3D scenes from different sources let's just say as an example different software and what's exciting about this is that it can allow multiple artists to work on the same scene at the same time by granting each artist power to work in their own little file called a layer without erasing or editing any other artist's work all of which will be combined together at the end such as a model's geometry being in one layer another layer for materials and another one for animation for example but it can get much more impressive than that the second key feature is what they call schemas a way to define a particular type of object or entity in a 3D scene such as a mesh camera or light it also comes with a unique and extendable structure along with features that can be easily customized to be used for compositing rendering simulation and so on for example USD itself comes bundled with core schemas such as shading Nvidia has also worked with Pixar and apple to build physics schemas for rigid bodies you know the ability to create extra stuff for it USD is also designed to easily transfer 3D assets between different software for instance hyra framework which in simple terms is a way to make the USD F format compatible with any render engine it is much more complex than that and USD itself has much more features but this is I think the general gist of it I recently wanted to up my product animation game you know those crispy modern product animations that you can see everywhere nowadays and this class by Derek Elliott was an awesome resource to learn from and I feel like I understand the basics but what Derek offers in this class is a workflow on how to combine all the knowledge into one awesome looping animation by the way if you are interested in learning more about animation skillshare is the place for you skillshare is the largest learning community on the web with thousands of classes led by industry Professionals in film illustration design freelance productivity and more and what I like more about skill share is their recent learning path Edition where you not only can pick a class but also a learning path with multiple courses handpicked and curated specifically to help you achieve your goals so if you want for example to master modeling an animation in blender this learning path is a perfect pick for you you will go through all the major Milestones by learning modeling sculpting lighting and materials in addition to animation so the first 1,000 people to click the link in the description will get a one month free skillshare premium membership which will allow you to access the entire library of learning path and in addition to all their classes skillshare has been a big suppor of the channel for a long time so please help support the channel and pick a new skill by clicking the link in the description what many people in the field will tell you is that Innovation itself may not always be recognized after all the CG industry is known to be filled with a lot of package politics so the question now is how did the industry react to it well while it wasn't expected the technology was received positively and the format is already in circulation with a lot of potential for the future as a matter of fact USD has already created an impressive butterfly fact in the industry which all started back when it was represented at sigraph in 2016 following the release of Finding Dory by Van gelder who spent more than two decades developing Pixar Tools in an interview he gave to Nvidia blog he recalled we had talked to people about USD but we weren't sure they would embrace it he said I did a live demo on a laptop of a scene from Finding Dory so they could see USD scalability and performance and what we at Pixar could do with it and they really got the message as an example what the industry's reaction to it was and the butterfly effect it created one of the people in the crowd that CRA was rev Laban the vice president of simulation technology at Nvidia was inspired by it which resulted in a series of ideas and events that led to the creation of viia Omniverse a realtime 3D Graphics collaboration platform where artists can work on their scenes together and to sync the different software they use and this was only possible because USD was at the heart and soul of this tool following that the format was quickly getting adopted into the industry with many commercial software starting to add it such as nuke Houdini Maya blender and pretty much any other software you can imagine but also in the production side of things starting of course with Pixar's movies but also by other companies such as double negative as mentioned by Jeff cliffford their head of R&D who said that they have used it to convert many large environment assets from their proprietary system over to USD for testing and they have been using the USD viewer successfully in production which is really good but recently let's just say that things became even more serious while the usd5 format has been on the rise for many years I believe it has never been as big as it is nowadays especially after a certain event that happened because you see in August of last year many big heads of the industry joined for forces with Pixar to form the open USD Alliance and these are Adobe apple odesk and vdia together with the joint development foundation and affiliate of the Linux Foundation from what I can see the goal behind this Alliance is to promote USD to potentially make it the standard five format within the 3D industry and to further develop the technology around it Gordon Bradley for instance a senior software architect at autodex said whether you are building worlds or original Twins or looking ahead for the 3D web content creators need a cohesive way to collaborate and share data across Tools in addition to services and platforms and Autodesk is excited to support the alliance for open USD as it drives 3D interoperability for visual effects animation and Beyond and supports our vision to help customers design and make a better world as for the likes of Apple Mike Rockwell Apple's vice president of the vision product group mentioned Apple has been an active contributor to the development of USD and it is an essential technology for the groundbreaking Vision OS platform as well as the new reality composer Pro developer tool we look forward to Forest in his growth into a broadly adapted standard so as you can see those companies have a plan to further develop USD and to make it the standard across all fields of 3D such as visual effects VR metaverse and so on but whether this will happen or not me personally I think it will even though there are some things that can stop it from happening so let's wait and see in terms of the challenges that the open USD project is currently facing for the most part the CG industry is known for a slow adaptation of new tools but that's for a reason because many studios have already built and developed their own pipe lines and in-house tools that work in harmony with each other so this can be very expensive and disruptive to their ongoing Productions if they want to do it again especially knowing what they currently have is working well for them another aspect to be aware of is that many studios already have their own file formats and they work with other in-house tools part of the reason behind this practice is that they are optimized to be used with their software and it helps them protect their intell your properties because one of the risks of using a format like USD is that how easy it can be opened with any software so Studios have their own formats to add security measures to protect their intellectual property and maintain control over their creative assets but while it is the case now I think we can still be helpful because USD is simply that good and maybe eventually it will become the golden standard of the field I hope you guys found this video useful and informative if you did please give it a thumbs up you can also check some of our previous videos thank you very much for watching and I will see you in the next one

Channel: InspirationTuts

Views: 8,432

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Id: vYhzit8x1tw

Length: 11min 27sec (687 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2024