No it is used for production everyday at Pixar, not just lookdev.
And other studios are doing this as well:
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Pixar, DreamWorks, Animal Logic, MPC, The Mill, Rodeo FX are using USD. I guess there are even much more studios. I don’t know who is using PTEX (only Disney and Blizzard) what the real benefits are in production.
I’m confused, are you disagreeing with me? No where in that document is there mentions of using USD for execution and processing, just for pipeline. You literally can’t do that kind of stuff with USD, you cant deform meshes, you cant run sims, you can’t model. It can only reference and store data.
Our anim team saves out alembics from the anim scene (usually maya or houdini), we reference it in the USD context using houdini, materials can be declared before you export as a custom variable (Material_path for example). When you change something in the USD context you need to give that “layer” an override (in usd its called an “opinion”). So if I want to change that material, I need to change that current “material_path” attribute using an override (“opinion”). These “opinions” can be added to the same usd scene (called a “stage”) by multiple people at once, thats what is so powerful about it, to say the least.
This is putting rather simply though, have you even watched the video in the first post? It literally explains this.
yes it’s a good thing for organization and scene assembly. efficent pipelines rely on that
You can use a format for loading and saving. But in between those 2 things you have the option to do what you wish with the data. So having the ability to save and load USD is separate from animating running sims etc… For example I could load a static environment that was a USD. But then in Blender animate standard characters.
Yes you’re basically agreeing with me then
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Yes, but there is the option to define extra data schemas in USD. So for example, there could be extra Blender animation data saved in the file that only Blender knows how to interpret.
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nice! I hope they collaborate with the USD devs and people
Which gets you into the same weeds as Collada, unfortunately
I would think Pixar will be able to keep a tighter ship when it comes to an I/O spec. compared to Khronos Group, I mean the company itself is dependent on its own technology to get projects done so…
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I think you should see this - another sign that usd is a thing:
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That’s the sickest thing I’ve seen in a while. It would be really cool in Blender adopted that same workflow for everything nodes. So straightforward and simple to use. Also USD is pretty great. it would really help Blender interoperate with software better imo, especially Houdini for effects work.
I agree with @Ace_Dragon PIXAR is actually using this in production. Like OpenSubDiv there is a more likely chance that since its coming from PIXAR it will have higher adoption and better support from other DCC apps. Its a really good format. Really reminds of the rib file format back in the day. It’s probably an updated less renderer dependent version of that.
Good info
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I just saw this, it seems Autodesk is also jumping to USD & other Open Source formats as more Studios are interested, will this be the killer of their FBX format?
we will see if this is going to kill FBX - but it’s more open and it’s true that many studios and developers are now jumping on the USD train. There are discussions to include USD to the VFX reference platform. But because it still runs on Python 2 they have to progress in their development.
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Worked on cleaning up the USD exporter code and adding automated tests. This includes a superclass that can hopefully be used more widely in Blender to help loading blendfiles from C++ and performing more automated tests in general.
Source: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Sybren/Reports/2019#Nov_11_-_17
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