OpenUSD: Creating digital worlds together

The Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), formed in 2023 by Pixar, Apple, Adobe, Autodesk, and NVIDIA, in conjunction with the Joint Development Foundation, fosters the continued development, evolution, and standardization of OpenUSD to make large-scale 3D projects more manageable, efficient, and creatively ambitious.

As more organizations contribute to the advancement of OpenUSD, all users can benefit from the collective progress. For example, Autodesk Maya’s USD plug-in is based on the open-source plug-ins that both Pixar and Animal Logic originally wrote to use USD for Maya. And in turn, Autodesk has made its Maya USD plug-in an open-source project. In recent years, Autodesk has integrated OpenUSD workflows into more content creation tools, including 3ds Max, Arnold, and Bifrost for Maya.

Animation, visual effects (VFX), and game studios have struggled for decades with poor interoperability between tools in their production pipelines. Faced with the challenge of moving data from one place to another, studios built elaborate pipelines to manage data interoperability, often including customized tools.

Even Pixar experienced problems with the interchange of data between different applications. After Pixar’s 2012 movie Brave, the studio decided that its scene descriptions had become so complex that it needed a real solution. That year, Pixar developed Universal Scene Description (USD) to deal with the overwhelming complexity of having too many different APIs and file formats within their 3D pipeline. In 2016, Pixar released USD as open-source code so it could become a standard for the VFX and animation industries. Pixar realized that all studios had the same problem with complexity management, and by making Universal Scene Description open-source, it would be an extensible format that other parties could improve, sharing the benefits with everyone.

OpenUSD solves several workflow and complexity challenges for creating 3D scenes. As an open-source standard, OpenUSD provides an extensible common language that’s interoperable between compatible software and platforms. Its system of layered data allows non-destructive editing for easy collaboration. Multiple artists can work on the same asset at the same time using OpenUSD’s versioning features to merge everyone’s work. OpenUSD can also provide fast access to enormous datasets, which enables real-time playback and the ability to edit complex scenes interactively.

One major benefit of OpenUSD is it’s system-agnostic design, so you can use it with ease across multiple platforms and programs. But how does OpenUSD work with solutions like Maya and 3ds Max?

Integration Integration is easy with the open-source USD for Maya extension and USD for 3ds Max extension. These extensions allow everyone involved in the production process to work seamlessly within Maya, 3ds Max, and other software that supports OpenUSD as needed.

Open-source As with OpenUSD itself, the code for the USD for Maya and USD for 3ds Max plugins is open-source and constantly evolving and improving. Users can directly contribute to the code for these plugins on GitHub.

Whereas other file formats are flat and don’t allow for multiple components of the same scene, OpenUSD is comprised of multiple layers, which is one of its key strengths. This makes it possible to:

Combine assets Different assets—such as an object, a 3D character, a light source, or anything else—are added to the scene in separate independent but connected layers, fostering a dynamic and collaborative post-production working environment where creativity can thrive.

Organize layers Layers can be easily combined and ordered in OpenUSD according to the requirements of the scene, so you can experiment to make it match your vision.

Creation without destruction One of the most useful aspects of OpenUSD is its non-destructive workflow. This means that several people can work on the same scene simultaneously without disrupting each other’s contribution. Effectively, you can make edits and alterations to the files, and they won’t affect anyone else’s work unless they choose to include the modified files in their iteration.

For more information on how OpenUSD software workflows work, including a live demo, check out our webinar, cracking the case on OpenUSD: How to achieve glorious 3D interoperability.