The Academy Software Foundation’s USD Working Group is one of our largest and most active communities, with over 1,000 contributors working to advance the development of the Universal Scene Description (USD) format. It also hosts several sub-Working Groups dedicated to specific projects, including the USD Assets Sub Working Group, which focuses on USD asset import/export, asset structure, testing, and schema design.
Over the past two years, the USD Assets Group has been developing the USD Collective Projects Initiative as USD adoption has grown across the visual effects industry. This is an open source test bed aiming to standardize on definitions for assets and scenes to be used in production pipelines, and to uncover USD support shortcomings within common VFX tools in order to encourage future fixes and continued development.
To get started, the USD Assets Group developed a set of “VFX Intent” guidelines to establish the many possible ways that one asset or scene can be described within USD, in an attempt to answer questions around VFX pipeline and workflow requirements. Based on co-chair Paolo Selva’s past work at WetaFX, the VFX Intent guidelines address questions like where to put LODs, where to identify geometry, and other tangible requirements for putting an asset into an actual shot.
With those guidelines in place, the Group was able to gather several volunteers to work on its first sample project in this nascent repository: Collective Project 001. Volunteers contributed remotely from around the world, on different machines and using different DCCs. This variety was key to uncovering differences in how different tools handle USD in different ways, and where USD support is falling short. For Collective Project 001, Academy Software Foundation members generously helped out – Open 3D Engine (O3DE) donated its Odie mascot as the featured asset, and Pixar donated RenderMan licenses for testing free of charge.
“USD is intended to be universal, but it is still new to many folks in the industry, and we’re all working out the kinks as its adoption grows,” shared Martin Davies, co-chair of the USD Assets Group. “The USD Collective Projects Initiative plans to continue doing more of these sample projects where we can expose issues or limitations within a given workflow. The benefit to this effort being housed within the Academy Software Foundation is that many of the tool developers are part of this community, so we can directly engage their engineers to address what we find.”
“The USD Collective Projects Initiative is important because as a test bed, we’re able to try things before they get into production,” added Selva. “With just this first project, we were already able to uncover notable differences across DCCs, such as two renderers handling the lighting differently. We’ve already heard success stories from the community where people have pulled this project into their own pipeline for validation, and uncovered things that needed fixing. This is a huge dog-fooding effort from our whole community that will benefit us all in the long run.”
Selva and Davies recently hosted a presentation as part of the Academy Software Foundation’s annual Virtual Town Hall series, sharing the latest updates and a roadmap for the year ahead. Sign up here to view the recording.
Selva and Davies also thanked the volunteers who contributed to this first project, including: Joe Bryant, Stephanie Doppler, Jan Haluszka, Mason Kirby, Matthew Low, Lucas Morante, JT Nelson, David Nguyen, Michael Becker, Joan Panis, Cleber Sales Pereira, Nick Porcino, and Alexander Schwank.
If you’d like to get involved with the USD Assets Sub Working Group, join their Slack channel at #wg-usd-assets, or join one of their virtual biweekly meetings.
