Is USD the Future of 3D Animation / VFX?

I tried so hard find the form that that suited you [Music] what do all these Productions have in common USD or Universal scene description this computer is running umbrella Engine 5 and we've got Maya blender Houdini substance painter the whole 3D family and all of these applications are running simultaneously you can do this at home on your computer or if you have a bunch of different people in different locations on different machines this works either way now before to have all these applications work together we need to export data back and forth you will file formats pipelines incompatible data types this has never been a fun process but now with USD is our common link between all these applications and Nvidia Omniverse as the central Hub connecting them all which is Free by the way watch this move the camera change the model update the texture do this in Houdini use an asset Library use the different asset Library move stuff around change the lighting do whatever you want to do because all these applications talk to each other and sync their data almost instantly and you can choose whether to look at everything everywhere all at once or just work on your one asset and let other people look at everything else this is why USD is such a big deal and it's just getting started so today we're going to talk three big questions what is USD how is it production and how can we take advantage of its capabilities today so question one what is USD well open USD is a scene composition engine developed by Pixar Animation Studios Pixar built this technology to help with their movies they realized that to have these giant worlds and all these scenes with complex characters and geometry and everything that goes into these movies they needed a better way to work with data traditional pipelines for visual effects and animation has always kind of had data going from one Department to the next as everyone takes their turn on this assembly line working on the stuff which means that later departments have to wait for that stuff to get to them and things like that now we're seeing that update in a lot of different ways in the industry with Unreal Engine and all kinds of real-time Technologies as the model of the pipeline is changing and artists are able to work more collaboratively in real time and so on specifically with openusd the goal here as I understand it is to have a software agnostic file format and more to be able to allow artists to work with any data in any application at any time but USD is not just a file format that's what I thought it was for a while but it's not it's actually a description of scene composition data or a way to describe the the world as a composition if you're familiar with After Effects think about the fact that you could have multiple layers and you can put them all in a composition you can pre-comp those things and then you can have other layers and another pre-comp and you can pre-comp those together you can just have these different collections like in blender for example you've got all these collections with stuff and other collections inside of them USD works very much the same way it can represent geometry shaders materials lights cameras animation data it can hold all that stuff and the thing about it is it's Universal it works with any tool and because it's being widely adopted by the entire industry pretty much any application can work with it can import it and deal with it without any major issues and the only issues that currently exist are just because it's newer and people are still adopting it but that's happening fast it's an open source free technology with C plus and python API integration so you can develop tools for it you can do whatever you want with it because it's available and its focus is speed performance non-destructive workflows and real-time collaboration to boil all of that down into something very tangible and easy to understand you can think of each type of work you might want to do modeling texturing animation lighting camera stuff all these different departments or types of work can just be a layer of USD data that an artist or group of artists can be working on and messing with and all of it can be referenced iterated upon and used as layers in larger compositions of USD data so you can have as granular of control as you want if you're a solo artist working on a project you can literally just use USD as a file format you export a model as USD and there it is it's a file format or if you're working with a team and you want to have that control to split things out where you could have your camera work your environment your models your textures you can have all these things broken out so that if you want to mess with them they are separate from each other and they can be iterated and messed with independently and since each artist can be responsible for a layer you won't be stepping on each other's work and you can deal with additives and overrides and how you want that data to all work together but it's all actually very simple when you're actually using it not just hearing the theory in a YouTube video but enough Theory let's talk practice let's talk production who's actually using this and how are they using it well I just came from siggraph and I can tell you that literally everybody was talking about USD that's like the main topic of the entire week was USD and how it's being used and all these examples it's it's like the thing right now and rightfully so it's a big deal I can give you some examples from my time of siggraph HBO is The Last of Us for example used USD all over the place the various Studios that were involved there was a Houdini talk where they discussed all the destruction and World building all that kind of stuff leveraging these massive assets and building these giant worlds using USD there were talks on Pipeline virtual production animation there were all kinds of presentations not all of them centered on USD specifically but all of them can leverage it if they hadn't already been doing it to give a very practical example of how I use USD I often have to export my animation as Olympic data because if it's not compatible with fbx and I have to send it off to Houdini or to Unreal or to blender or to wherever to you know get it out of Maya with all the deformations if it's not compatible with a game engine historically I've used alembic caches to bake out all that information but I've been using USD instead lately because the file size is so much smaller and it plays so much quicker I can't tell you exactly why that is I haven't gotten quite that deep yet but I know that when I bring in the Olympic cache with you know hundreds of frames of Animation data all baked deformed geometry I can play that at you know 12 13 frames a second sometimes 9 frames a second in some applications but if I bring that same information in using USD I save a lot of hard drive space and it plays the 24 FPS every time which is my goal I haven't actually tested it higher than that for game engine stuff I'm typically doing 24 FPS work but here's one more example from siggraph there was a Hands-On lab where you could go and learn how to do some stuff it's like a live tutorial live class very cool the lab was about creating character animation and leveraging some AI tools to help speed that up we use armor London 5 blender and nvidia's audio to face application we took the rigged character in blender with some animation data we brought that into Unreal Engine walks around does its thing but for the facial animation we brought the character into nvidia's audio to face mapped that to this stylized character AI helped us generate 52 blend shapes the usual AR kit blend shave to this stylized mesh from there you feed the application in audio file it generates facial animation and lip sync data it's not quite the same as if we were doing it hand keyed but it's quick it's easy it lets you bring it back into blender we brought it over to Unreal Engine and there he is there's the character in a 40-minute demo we were able to bring all of this full circle with different applications into a complete piece of work now this isn't going to make sense for every workflow but the fact that this is a possibility now so quickly and so easily with a platform like USD this is a pretty big deal and what's cool for those of us animators out there you can still mess with the blend shapes you can still add additional animation like we don't have to just say cool AI did our jobs for us I know some people forget about that it's just a tool and we can go beyond that and that's where the opportunity lies for those artists out there who are like well what about me you can tell from this that it's not you know a high fidelity performance that you'd see in a movie we need to take it further but for some reason you've got a project that's going to have 30 seconds of facial animation this can give you a nice Head Start so finally how can we take advantage of USD well if you're using tools like kid bash you might already be using it they just come out with cargo which is that application that you can actually just pull individual assets from the kit bash Library into any scene that runs off USD that's a great example of just having all the data software agnostic you can drop it into any application that's pretty cool and that's example something being created off of the technology of openusd but for larger Productions or if you're doing a short film or a Capstone thesis like whatever scale you might be working at the best way to do what I showed you at the beginning of this video to have all these applications talk to each other is through Nvidia Omniverse a free set of tools that does a lot it's composed of five main categories the first is the nucleus which is sort of the data server that links all these things together you have the ability to host the data server and you know connect stuff remotely so if you're a big team or a studio that's how they could have the computers all talk to each other and that's going to give you that bi-directional streaming via USD but you can also just do it locally on your computer you can just install it and use it you don't have to do all the server stuff either the nucleus is important because that's how the applications know like where the files live and how to talk to each other and then there's all the connectors the plugins that you install into each application for I think over 150 applications at this point that's how I got Maya and Houdini and emerald engine and all those applications to interface and then there's kit simulation in the RTX renderer kit is the SDK the framework where you can build tools on top of openusd the simulation side is more for physical based simulation the massive amount of data processing for real-time Ai workflows and that kind of stuff that's where you're going to get like the engineering and construction and Manufacturing and like that side of Industry I don't think the animation industry is using that quite as much and last is the RTX renderer a way to visualize all this data in real time Ray traced lit all that kind of stuff so if you have an RTX GPU you can do all these things you could have all these applications running and you can look at it all in a lit rendered environment using your graphics card and if you don't have that Hardware you can still utilize everything else we've covered you just won't look at it rendered in RTX with an Omniverse but those applications all still talk to each other and you can still use all that functionality just fine so the short answer is if you want to start using USD you can just start exporting to it from your software applications right now or I'll leave some links below to download Nvidia Omniverse if you want to get into the bigger tools and more collaborative workflows between your applications and if you want to see a tutorial for the whole real-time workflow I actually did a video for NVIDIA Omniverse a couple years ago at this point where I opened some stuff in the unreal Marketplace connected it to Maya and all these applications and so messing with it so if you want to see that as sort of a Hands-On thing I'll put that down below as well and that's USD in a nutshell I hope you enjoyed the crash course I hope you enjoyed this video if you did hit the like button subscribe if you want to see more stuff like this as always links to everything useful down below I'm sure Wade and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 157,074

Keywords: openusd, universal scene description, 3d usd, NVIDIA Omniverse, Maya usd, blender usd, Houdini usd, substance painter, ue5 usd, unreal engine 5, ue5.3, ue5.2, what is usd, usd vs abc, alembic, pixar usd, Siggraph, animation industry, animation workflows, 3d workflow, vfx workflow, pipeline, 3d pipeline, animation pipeline, realtime, realtime collaboration, realtime pipeline, cg, 3d, ai animation, 3d ai tools, audio2face, nvidia 4090, rtx 4090, rtx, rtx rendering, ray tracing, b3d

Id: m43l9RXJcYg

Length: 9min 41sec (581 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 16 2023