Can someone with tech knowledge about SL comment on the Pixar-created USD standard mentioned here?

[Katherine Heartsong]

https://www.roadtovr.com/nvidia-usd-html-metaverse-foundation/

How might something like SL take advantage of such inter-operability?

Edited August 31, 2022 by Katherine Heartsong

[Kadah Coba]

I would be surprised if USDp actually goes anywhere long term. Short term is possibly like any other industry fad buzzwords, which 'metaverse' has become since the fade out of 'blockchain' and the crash and burn of 'NFTs'.

[animats]

Content upload is moving to gLTF 2.0, as discussed at Creator User Group today. We get more shader layers. Blender and May already speak gLTF, so we're good there.

gLTF is roughly comparable to COLLADA, the format used for uploading meshes now, but knows about  more modern rendering. You can put all the info needed for a model with mateirals in gLTF, and, hopefully, see in world what you saw in Blender and Maya.

gLTF does less but is well defined. USD is sort of a packaging system with lots of other stuff in other formats inside. I'm not too clear on who is putting what inside. Apple has a version for IOT called USDz, NVidia has a version for Omniverse, Pixar/Disney has a version for in-house use, and they're not compatible. Anyone enough into USD to say more?

[OptimoMaximo]

On 9/2/2022 at 6:37 AM, animats said:

Content upload is moving to gLTF 2.0, as discussed at Creator User Group today. We get more shader layers. Blender and May already speak gLTF, so we're good there.

gLTF is roughly comparable to COLLADA, the format used for uploading meshes now, but knows about  more modern rendering. You can put all the info needed for a model with mateirals in gLTF, and, hopefully, see in world what you saw in Blender and Maya.

gLTF does less but is well defined. USD is sort of a packaging system with lots of other stuff in other formats inside. I'm not too clear on who is putting what inside. Apple has a version for IOT called USDz, NVidia has a version for Omniverse, Pixar/Disney has a version for in-house use, and they're not compatible. Anyone enough into USD to say more?

I can say something about it.

Right now, USD is the format that every vfx and cartoons studio want to move to. In the last two years I moved from the game industry to the movie productions, so I'm well aware as per why this is such a buzzword now.

Imagine that every studio has every department starting point with a "build" stage and a finish point with a "publish". Every single component and subcomponent gets a publish, and a versioning number as well. Every step in the production has to query the latest or the recommended version of every single component and subcomponent from the previous production step to build their starting point from.

So this production method leads to the need of automation tools for the building system (queries to the database, say Shotgrid, save path retrieval or download, building in the scene) and publishing, which is the reverse process. Therefore, interoperability between studios is not really that viable this way, because each one has their own system, categorization, dissection method and sometimes proprietary nodes involved in the scene. USD comes in as a generalized "builder" and "publisher" of scenes, because it can be updated at a second time, offline, or can contain scripted instructions to do things at loading time to update assets if need be. So as far as dcc software solution interoperability format it is extremely useful, considering that the latest fashion consists in studios collaborating remotely and doing work splits on a per-department basis. If needed, I could provide some examples, but that would take quite a wall of text right now, so I will leave at that if the process is not clear.

In the game industry, instead, this isn't a so much felt need as much as in the movies, because the production within a dcc software is limited to the assets alone, and the building happens in an engine, as opposed to the movie production, where animation scenes are considered assets (compound assets made of tons of different assets) on their own and need to be updated from time to time with content from other stages, departments or people, and so the asset that goes to rendering needs to be rebuilt from scratch before one can continue to work on it.

From rumors, USD format is Pixar's take at a compounded equivalent of gltf that is more inclined to work with many pointers to different asset types in a single archive file, containing useful Metadata for the kind of work flow that is used in movies, rather than a file format containing more "raw" type of data for the contained asset.

[Kathrine Jansma]

1 hour ago, OptimoMaximo said:

From rumors, USD format is Pixar's take at a compounded equivalent of gltf that is more inclined to work with many pointers to different asset types in a single archive file, containing useful Metadata for the kind of work flow that is used in movies, rather than a file format containing more "raw" type of data for the contained asset.

Sounds a bit like some kind of BOM (Bill of materials) format for assets (e.g. something like CycloneDX (https://cyclonedx.org/use-cases/) for software).