Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, NVIDIA and Pixar have founded the Alliance for OpenUSD to grow the 3D framework that’s winning over engineers.
Today, five tech heavyweights joined forces to further the cause of Universal Scene Description (USD), a 3D file framework that’s gaining traction in the engineering community.
Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, NVIDIA and Pixar are the founding members of the new Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), which aims to develop USD specifications to foster wider adoption and greater compatibility across the full ecosystem of 3D software.
The spread of USD
USD was developed by animation studio Pixar, which made the framework open source in 2016. Since then USD has been spreading throughout both the entertainment and engineering industries. It has now been rebranded OpenUSD for easier searchability and to align with Pixar’s other open source projects (such as OpenSubdiv and OpenTimelineIO).
In 2018 Apple adopted a packaged version of the framework, called USDZ, for its augmented reality applications, and the company says it’s an essential part of the visionOS platform underpinning the new Vision Pro headset. In 2021, USD found new fans in the engineering world as the native format of NVIDIA’s enterprise 3D software Omniverse. The graphics giant has often likened USD to “the HTML of 3D” since it enables a variety of 3D file formats to be composed in the Omniverse platform.
Now USD is supported in many popular 3D applications, including Adobe’s Substance 3D suite; Autodesk products including 3ds Max, Fusion 360, Maya, Arnold and Revit; game engines Unity and Unreal Engine; and others including Chaos V-Ray, Blender, Cinema 4D, Shapr3D and many more.
Goals of the Alliance for OpenUSD
The AOUSD is an open and non-profit organization that plans to develop a written specification for OpenUSD’s core functionality. Eventually, the Alliance hopes the standard will be recognized by bodies such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Additionally, the AOUSD aims to coordinate the evolution of OpenUSD with new functionality, provide a repository of reference implementations, and push the standard into new use cases and implementations.
“OpenUSD gives 3D developers, artists, and designers the complete foundation to tackle large-scale industrial, digital content creation, and simulation workloads with broad multi-app interoperability,” said Guy Martin, director of open source and standards at NVIDIA, in a press release from the Linux Foundation. The Alliance for OpenUSD is hosted by Linux Foundation affiliate the Joint Development Foundation (JDF).
Supporting the five founding members of the AOUSD are general members Cesium, Epic Games, Foundry, Hexagon, Ikea, SideFX and Unity. General membership is open to members of the Linux Foundation for an annual fee of $10,000.
“This alliance is a unique opportunity to accelerate OpenUSD collaboration globally by building formal standards across industries and initiatives to realize 3D worlds and industrial digitalization,” Martin added.