Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 12, 2017. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Alongside other well-known open source projects for developing industry standards, such as OpenEXR and Alembic, Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic have now released the first open source version of MaterialX – an open standard for exchanging material and look-development content between DCC applications and renderers. ILM has already used the standard in films such as “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” and in ILMxLAB’s “Trials On Tatooine”. You can also read yesterday’s announcement here.
What Exactly Is MaterialX?
MaterialX addresses the lack of an open standard for representing data values and relationships in order to transfer the look of a 3D model from one software application or rendering engine to another. This includes all information such as shading networks, patterns and textures, nested materials and geometric assignments.
Specification and Development
The current specification v1.35 of June 28, 2017 names four data relationships necessary for specifying the look of a CG object. This includes the definition
- of texture processing networks of image sources, operators, connections and parameters, in order to combine one or more files into textures for various shader inputs (e.g. “Diffuse_albedo” or “bumpmap”).
- of geometry-specific information, such as assigned texture filenames or IDs for the various mapping types.
- of the parameter values and connections to the texture processing networks.
- of the connection between geometries and materials in a model.
The open source project is accessible to developers here on GitHub. As a plug-in, the Multiverse tool from J-Cube currently offers MaterialX-based file exchange between Maya and Katana. It uses a MaterialXS Library based on the published MaterialX specification.
For further information, you can follow the official website and, for updates, the Twitter account @MaterialXcg .
