For those who don’t know the tool: MoonRay is a production path tracer with a USD Hydra render delegate for tools using OpenUSD, positioned in rendering and lookdev next to ASWF staples like OpenColorIO.

The Academy Software Foundation has added MoonRay as a hosted project, keeping the renderer under foundation governance while opening contributions to a broader community. DreamWorks Animation developed MoonRay as an open source production path tracing renderer and has used it on every one of its feature films since 2019, including The Wild Robot and The Bad Guys 2. The project uses the Apache 2.0 license and is developed in C++.

MoonRay includes support for distributed rendering and a pixel matching XPU mode that processes bundles of rays on the GPU as well as the CPU. It also includes bundled path tracing and a USD Hydra render delegate for integration into content creation tools that support the OpenUSD standard, which should make interactive preview workflows less of a custom science project in teh average pipeline.

The ASWF angle

MoonRay now sits alongside other hosted efforts in the ASWF roster, including OpenEXR, OpenVDB, OpenTimelineIO, and Open Shading Language. If your facility already treats OpenColorIO as plumbing, this is the same neighborhood.

For contributors, the project points developers to openmoonray.org and to the ASWF Slack workspace for a MoonRay channel at slack.aswf.io. Documentation is published at docs.openmoonray.org, and the source repository lives under the OpenMoonRay organization on GitHub.

Keynote season meets SIGGRAPH season

ASWF Open Source Days runs in Los Angeles on July 19 to 20, 2026, and the schedule aligns with SIGGRAPH 2026 timing. The keynote comes from DreamWorks Animation CTO Bill Ballew, with a talk titled How to Train Your Renderer: MoonRay’s Journey from DreamWorks’ Dragons to the ASWF.

The event listing describes July 19 as the main program day in Los Angeles, followed by July 20 as a full day of open source Birds of a Feather sessions within SIGGRAPH. The Call for Proposals remains open through May 24, 2026, via the Open Source Days event site.

As always, test new tools and new governance setups before you bet a production schedule on them, even when the feautres list looks exactly like what your render wranglers asked for.

https://openmoonray.org/

https://www.aswf.io/

The post MoonRay Renderer joins ASWF as hosted project first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The latest update to Nuke Stage stays with the preview: real-time playback of photoreal environments on LED walls, plus live compositing tools that shoulkd feel familiar to artists. The tool targets virtual production and in camera visual effects (ICVFX), with a workflow designed to keep VFX artists in creative control on set.

The core stays high-resolution playback for 2D and 2.5D environments, with EXR as the playback format and USD used for 3D geometry. Live compositing comes from a set of Nuke nodes rewritten for real-time performance, so operators can blend the on-set environment with the physical build and manage the relationship between camera and screen.

The practical takeaway: this is not a game engine project that happens to output to a wall. It is a VFX-flavoured playback and live comp system that tries to keep your pipeline language intact.

The parts you actually run on set

Foundry built a three part architecture: an editor where the operator works, a headless networking relay, and render nodes that run on each machine driving the wall. A launcher defines where those processes run and can start them across a larger stage, then the editor connects to the relay and render nodes and reports cluster health.

A typical topology puts the editor and relay on the control machine, distributes renders to the render nodes, then sends images to the wall. The setup flow walks through networking first, then hardware outputs and physical displays, then display mapping, and then cameras and tracking. Configurations can be exported and imported so teams do not have to repeat the same stage setup every day. Unless they want to. But in general, that is the unglamorous part of virtual production that still decides whether you shoot before lunch or after dinner.

Metadata Vault: your future self says thanks

The headline feature is metadata capture via a Vault that records on-set decisions for handoff into post. The Nuke Stage supports logging scene data, camera tracking, lens metadata, timecode, scene settings, and colour decisions. The Vault documentation also describes two capture workflows: Snapshots for a point-in-time save, and Take Record, which creates a camera USD file between defined start and end points.

If you have ever tried to reproduce a wall look from a vague note like “match take three but slightly warmer with some *Ooompf* “, this aims to make the record concrete. It will not fix bad habits, but it can at least preserve what you actually did on set.

NotchLC and EXR playback, plus a faster sequencer loop

On the playback side, the feature list now includes native support for NotchLC and B44 EXR for high-resolution background playback. There is a drag-and-drop sequencer panel, one-click keyframing, and editing and interpolation tools for timing changes.

In the operator view, the track-based sequencer remains central. Content created in Nuke can be staged over time, keyframed, and adjusted live for collaborative iteration with the on-set team.

USD scenes and splats, now aimed at the wall

Nuke Stage supports importing OpenUSD scenes that can be edited and overridden for real-time blending of virtual and physical sets. For file and colour standards, the tool lists OpenEXR and OpenColorIO alongside ACEScg support via ACES. It also claims support for HDR and a color pipeline intended to carry creative decisions from set into post.

For scene representations, the tool now highlights importing and controlling Gaussian Splats for high fidelity 3D scenes, alongside standard USD geometry. In the broader ecosystem, Foundry also shipped Gaussian Splat support in Nuke and built a USD based 3D system in there too, which positions splats and USD as shared data types across stage and post.

Standard hardware, scaling, and the usual fine print

The product page repeats the goal of running on commodity hardware without specialist media servers or bespoke equipment, and scaling across render node clusters. It frames this as cost and setup-time control and as a way to make stages repeatable.

Pricing is not specified in the sources. The product page offers a register your interest contact flow.

New tools and innovations should be tested before use in production, especially anything that touches playback codecs, cluster timing, genlock, tracking inputs, and colour consistency. Run your own worst-case plate, your own camera tracking feed, and your own handoff into post before you bet a shoot day on it.

https://www.foundry.com/products/nuke-stage

The post Foundry expands Nuke Stage for LED walls first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Autograph is a 2D plus 3D compositor with a USD core, can hook into Maxon Studio and Red Giant, and imports SVG from Adobe Illustrator and Figma plus PSD from Affinity and Adobe Photoshop.

Free now, with a catch that is not scary

Maxon has released Autograph 2026.0.0 and made it free for anyone with a (free) MyMaxon account. The same release adds native integration with Maxon Studio for searching, navigating, and applying Red Giant effects, and it adds full OpenFX support for third-party plugins. Pricing beyond that free individual access is not specified yet.

The Autograph pitch in plain production terms

Autograph is a motion graphics and compositing application that mixes a layer-based timeline with a 3D mode for manipulating 3D assets. Think Nuke met After Effects at the Flame Birthday party, and they got drunk.

From the left..

The new kid on the block!

The timeline includes a standard layer stack and a dope sheet, then it switches into a 3D workspace when you need to push assets around in depth.

Autograph also promotes a responsive design workflow aimed at delivering multiple resolutions and aspect ratios from a single project file. Autograph calls these “responsive-design compositions”. Elements can be positioned relative to frame dimensions so one project can render multiple aspect ratios without duplicating layouts.

On the feature list side, Autograph describes itself as a tool for motion graphics, VFX and compositing, plus 2D and 3D projects. So, eveything Comp. It also sports a GPU-powered engine and extensible capabilities as part of how the tool approaches performance and expansion.

OpenUSD 3D inside a compositor timeline

Autograph includes an integrated 3D workspace powered by OpenUSD. The 3D space blends with the 2D workflow and supports extruded vector shapes and text, using compositions as textures, and compositing with multi-pass renders inside the same application.

That same 3D space is useful for motion designers who want depth, lighting, and dimensional design without moving to another application, and for 3D artists who want to streamline texture creation and final composite across the broader toolchain.

Plug-ins, Studio integration, and the new OFX door

Autograph 2026.0.0 introduces full OpenFX support. That matters if your shop already lives and dies by OFX (because, why wouldnt it…), or if you want a compositor that does not treat third-party effects as an afterthought.

The release also adds native integration with Maxon Studio. The stated goal is quick search, navigation, and application of Red Giant effects from inside Autograph. Capsules are explicitly not available in Autograph yet.

One naming change also comes with the re-release: Instancer has been renamed to Cloner, aligning naming with Cinema 4D terminology. The Sources do not list additional feature renames beyond that one.

System requirements and supported platforms

Autograph 2026.0.0 supports Windows and macOS. On macOS, the supported versions listed are macOS 15 Sequoia and macOS 26 Tahoe, and the supported hardware requirement listed is Apple Silicon M1 or better, with 16 GB of memory.

On Windows x64, the supported operating systems listed are Windows 10 version 22H2 and Windows 11. The minimum CPU requirement listed is a 64-bit Intel or AMD CPU with AVX2 support. The minimum GPU requirement is either an NVIDIA GPU from the Maxwell generation or newer with at least 4 GB of VRAM, or an AMD RX 570 or RX 580 with 4 GB or 8 GB, or a discrete GPU with at least 4 GB VRAM and support for OpenCL. The memory requirement is 16 GB.

Test new tools and updates before you put them into a production-critical pipeline!

https://support.maxon.net/hc/en-us/articles/26689114527388-Autograph-2026-0-0-April-15-2026

The post Maxon Autograph 2026 is here first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Spark Story sits in early previs and story workshops, pairing a browser build step with a mobile virtual production app, plus workflows that touch Blender and Unreal Engine.

NAB gets the hands-on bit

Spark Story is set for a public preview at NAB Show 2026, with an interactive booth demo that lets attendees create shots live and move between a browser session and a mobile virtual production app. The preview is scheduled on the show floor from April 19 through April 22 in Las Vegas (Booth N3148). Lightcraft calls Spark Story the first piece of a broader Spark platform that is still in development, with the NAB preview focused on rapid virtual-shot creation, script linkage, and a browser-to-mobile workflow. A beta notification signup page for the broader Spark platform is already live, indicating that a formal beta program is planned and more or less around the corner.

The pitch is simple: start workshopping a film on day one with the team, using rapid virtual shot building instead of waiting for later stages to see whether scenes and beats land. The preview demo uses scanned environments (Splats) and prompted environments as part of setting a scene, plus the ability to block and capture camera shots from a phone.

Browser to phone, with script in the loop

The preview description frames Spark Story as a real-time workflow that links a browser tool with a mobile app so teams can collaborate while building scenes and placing cameras. Script linkage sits near the center of that workflow, with an emphasis on connecting shots back to a screenplay, and on turning camera placement in a 3D scene into entries that feed a shot list tied to settings and framing.

A separate feature preview calls out collaborative screenplay editing and breakdown, aimed at real-time collaboration and development from partial ideas into a full screenplay. That matters less for the final file format and more for how teams keep intent, coverage, and revisions connected while the visuals evolve.

If you have lived through the classic version of previs, where shots float around in a folder tree while the script keeps changing in a different tool, this is clearly trying to make that disconnect go away. The claim is that a team can move much faster through early planning, pitching, and shoot preparation.

Environments: scans, prompts, and Gaussians

The preview highlights three main buckets of scene content: scanned environments, prompted environments, and more traditional 3D content. It also calls out support for Gaussian Splats and imported USD assets in the same workspace.

For Gaussian Splats, the industry standard is 3D Gaussian Splatting, a real-time radiance field rendering approach with an official, publicly available reference implementation. For USD, the relevant target is OpenUSD, positioned as a platform for building and exchanging 3D scenes at scale.

The interesting bit here is not that any one of those elements exists, but that the preview bundles them into one collaborative shot-building flow. If teh tool can keep scale, orientation, and camera intent consistent while teams mix splats with USD assets, that would remove a lot of glue work that currently happens in side scripts and one-off conversion steps.

Camera intent and virtual production capture

The preview copy states that Spark Story builds scenes around realistic digital environments, physically correct motion, and camera and lens models intended to keep early decisions consistent through shoot days. That is a marketing claim, but it is also a promise: camera behaviour and motion should (!!!!) translate from early planning into on-set execution without a full redo.

On the capture side, the preview positions a mobile app as the place where shots get captured from anywhere, with an integrated iOS experience described as push-button simple. For the platform piece, that points straight at iOS, no word of Anroid yet.

The practical production question is what data comes out the other end and how it plays with the rest of a pipeline. The preview text focuses on workflow and collaboration rather than interchange details beyond imported USD assets. So, at press time, there is no confirmed list of export formats, tracking data handoff details, or round-trip guarantees for specific DCCs in the NAB preview description. But there are importers for Fab.comMegascans, Unreal, Autoshot, as well as Blender, Nuke and After Effects. No word on Lightwave.

What is confirmed on the ecosystem side

Outside the NAB preview messaging, the public documentation site already carries Spark Story sections alongside broader tooling docs, including workflow pages that reference Blender and Unreal-related processes and USD troubleshooting topics. That is not a full product spec, but it does confirm that Spark Story documentation exists publicly and that USD sits inside the expected workflow surface area.

That matters because it suggests this is not a closed demo-only concept. There is already a documentation structure, including tutorials and debugging notes, which is usually where pipelines go first when they try to validate a tool against real production constraints.

What to test before you bet a schedule on it

Rapid collaborative previs sounds great right up until a production needs repeatability, versioning, and predictable handoffs. If you plan to evaluate Spark Story, put it through the boring tests early: multiple artists editing the same sequence, script changes mid-session (Thrice), asset relinking, and exporting or round-tripping anything your downstream tools require.

New tools and innovations should always be tested before use in production, preferably on something disposable, like a two-day internal short that still hits the same technical constraints as a real show.

The post Spark Story at NAB first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Jürgen Firsching.

For those who don’t know the tool: 3ds Max is a DCC for modeling, animation, and rendering, often paired with Arnold and OpenUSD for lookdev and pipeline handoffs across VFX, broadcast, and realtime.

The newsroom tries to explain Max to itself

Over in the Digital Production newsroom, there is a special kind of silence that happens whenever I say the words modifier stack. Half the team nods like they understand. The other half quietly searches for a button called “Make It Pretty”. So here is the deal. 3ds Max 2027 lands with new modeling tools, new deformation noise, selection upgrades, performance work, viewport cleanup, and a few foundation updates that matter to pipeline folks who like their tools modern and their crashes vintage.

Smart Bevel: post Boolean intersections, less cleanup

Boolean modeling can be fast, brutal, and wonderfully irresponsible. The new Smart Bevel feature targets post Boolean intersections and focuses on creating cleaner bevels with less fuss. Smart Bevel is designed for post Boolean intersections and is presented as a way to create cleaner and more intricate bevels with ease. It is framed as a dedicated approach to getting better looking edges after Boolean work, aimed at reducing the need for manual cleanup.

This fits neatly into the hard surface rhythm a lot of artists know too well: cut the shape, stare at the resulting edge spaghetti, then spend quality time repairing the part that was supposed to be the fast part. Smart Bevel tries to make that edge repair step less of a ritual. And yes, Bela asked if this means booleans are finally safe. The answer is still no. But fewer sharp edges turning into a bveel shaped tragedy is a welcome upgrade.

Extrude and Spline Chamfer: splines get better directions

The Extrude modifier now supports a custom direction workflow. Splines can extrude with orientation and direction rather than only local Z. For spline driven workflows, that is a practical change, because it reduces the need to pivot objects around just to make an extrusion behave.

Spline Chamfer also gets updates, including the ability to use a fixed radius for consistent circular corners. This focuses on predictability, which matters when spline corners must stay consistent across revisions, instancing, or exported geometry. If you have ever watched a single inconsistent corner ripple into five downstream fixes, you already know why this is worth caring about.

Noise Plus: more fractals, animation, tiling controls

A new Noise Plus modifier arrives with new fractal types, animation ability, and tiling controls. It is positioned as a more capable procedural noise option for pushing results further. The legacy Noise modifier also gets updates. It now uses a modern Qt interface and supports Paramblock2 for user-defined defaults. The animated Phase parameter now uses linear interpolation rather than ease in and out, for more predictable animation behaviour. For deformation work, predictable interpolation is the unglamorous hero. It keeps animation curves from feeling like they are fighting you.

Field Helper: more precise component selections

A new Field Helper is introduced for more precise component selections for manipulating items, including driving selections.

This is paired with a performance note elsewhere in the release that Volume Select soft selection performance has been improved for polys. The stated goal is smoother, more responsive soft selection performance on high poly objects. In practical terms, selection quality and selection speed both matter. Selection is not just a click. It is the start of most modeling and deformation decisions, and it tends to multiply into every other step you do.

Viewport grid and display improvements: cleaner and less annoying

Viewport grid and background display have been refreshed to provide a cleaner, more focused environment. This is the part where the newsroom says, “Cool, so the background looks nicer!”, and searches for snacks.. Then a Max user quietly smiles, because they live in the viewport. The viewport is where time goes, and small friction reductions add up quickly.

Arnold for 3ds Max: MaxtoA updates

The included Arnold for 3ds Max plug-in is version 5.9.0. Updates since 3ds Max 2026.3 include lightweight OpenUSD instancing, a new hair scattering mode, more flexible light sampling, plus other enhancements and bug fixes. If your pipeline touches Arnold, these plugin updates matter because they affect how features show up inside the host.

Retopology and Shape Map: faster processing, better targets

Flow Retopology has been relocated to Tools and is now under Tools > Flow Retopology to make it easier to find and access as part of core modelling workflow. Retopology performance is described as improved via faster ReForm processing. It is presented as providing quicker results and improved support for meeting quad target goals, with more reliable and consistent outputs.

Shape Map performance is also described as much faster, reducing wait times when working with shape keys and morph targets. This is a more responsive shape-based workflow, especially with complex character rigs or detailed morphing operations.

Colour management: sampling and OCIO

Colour management gets updates. You can sample underlying colours from the scene space in windows that support it, including viewports and the Rendered Frame Window. The Colour Selector eyedropper includes options to sample display colour or sample scene colour. The software also uses the latest version of the OpenColorIO library (OCIO v2.5.1).

Autodesk Assistant: tech preview help inside the app

A tech preview called Autodesk Assistant is included. It is described as an AI-powered tool / LLM that helps you quickly find information about features and workflows directly within the product. This might be cool for beginners, or if you are looking for that feature you know is in there, but can’t find. Only time will tell if it works.

Bela asked if it can also explain why someone would stack twelve modifiers and still sleep at night. No promises were made.

Autodesk prices Subscriptions are at 255 USD per month or 2,010 US Dollars a year. In many countries, artists earning under 100,000/year and/or working on projects valued at under 100,000 Dollars per year can get the Indie subscription, which now cost 330 US Dollars a year. Before you roll this into a pipeline, do the boring but essential checks. Open hero scenes, validate modifier stacks, confirm export paths, and compare renders. New tools and innovations should be tested before use in production.

https://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2027/ENU/?guid=GUID-7CC2F041-F797-4DB9-B2F9-326AAB994F37

P.S. If you are asking yourself, “Where does he get the cat pictures?” Be in a chat with Bela for any amount of time, and you’ll have them, too.

The post 3ds Max 2027 is here. first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Mike Kuhn.

For those who don’t know the tool: OpenUSD is scene graph glue for pipelines, feeding DCCs and tools via schemas and composition, with viewers like usdview for sanity checks and debugging.

Gaussian splats, now speaking USD

OpenUSD v26.03 adds native support for 3D Gaussian Splats through a new schema family, UsdVolParticleField, including UsdVolParticleField3DGaussianSplat. The intent is simple: to represent 3D Gaussian Splat data as a first-class USD prim type rather than treating it as an exotic sidecar.

Alongside the schema, the release includes a reference Gaussian splat renderer named hdParticleField. It lives in the imaging examples folder and is meant for testing and conformance. You can run it through usdview, which makes it a practical starting point for anyone who wants to validate that splat data is wired up correctly before it touches a show pipeline.

A conversion script is also included to convert PLY files containing Gaussians into USD, located in the hdParticleField examples folder. That matters because PLY is a common interchange point for Gaussian data in production workflows today, and a direct bridge into USD removes a lot of bespoke glue code.

The update lands as interest in 3D capture formats keeps widening, especially for environment work and rapid scene reconstruction. A single USD-native representation makes it easier to keep splats in the same packaging, layering, and referencing system as the rest of a shot.

USD in the browser, because why not

OpenUSD v26.03 can now be compiled to WebAssembly. Support for wasm32 and wasm64 targets has been added using the Emscripten compiler. There is also a new wasmFetchResolver example that demonstrates loading and interacting with USD scenes directly inside a web browser via HTTP. That is a very specific demo, but it points to a wider reality: USD tooling is no longer automatically tied to desktop builds.

If your pipeline includes lightweight review tools, internal web dashboards, or simple interactive scene inspection in a browser, this release makes those targets less theoretical and more like normal engineering work.

Core composition gets more surgical

v26.03 implements sparse array-edit overrides. Layers can now override individual elements of array-valued attributes without replacing the entire array. The change required a significant rewrite of the core value resolution code for both metadata and attribute values.

Practically, this is the kind of feature that shows up everywhere once it exists. Adjust a handful of vertices. Nudge a few fastener positions. Patch a subset of data in a giant assembly. You get smaller deltas, cleaner composition, and less risk of stomping unrelated values upstream.

This is also one of those updates you want to test early, because composition edge cases love to hide in the corners – and edges, as the name suggests. Treat new composition behaviour as something to validate with real assets before you roll it into production.

OpenExec: Rigging experiments keep moving

Building on OpenExec introduced in v25.08, this release adds an IrFkController schema as an early step toward invertible rigging capabilities within USD. The controller provides forward and inverse FK computations that take scalar translate and rotate inputs plus a parent space to produce a posed space and vice versa.

It is described as early and not for production use, but it is still an important signal: rigging and evaluation inside USD continues to be an active target, not a side quest.

Cycle detection has also been improved. Data cycles formed across multiple compilation rounds are now caught, and the runtime returns control to the client with an error instead of aborting the process. That is not glamorous, but it is the kind of correctness work that saves hours when a bad rig graph shows up at 2 a.m.

Speedups where they count

The release includes targeted performance optimizations, with concrete examples. Composition dependency computation has been streamlined, reducing stage load time by approximately 11 percent in one production shot, from 3.5 seconds to 3.1 seconds. Another fix for .usdc sublayers with heavily-connected relationships brought a reported 200x improvement, from 20 seconds down to 0.1 seconds for a sublayer containing a relationship with 10,000 targets.

Deprecations and validators, the grown-up part

UsdImaging’s legacy scene delegate mode is now deprecated in favor of scene index mode. An environment variable that controls scene index behavior now defaults to enabled, and overriding it back will trigger a one-time deprecation notice. This completes a transition that began with scene index feature parity in v25.08 and the switch to the scene index default in v25.11.

usdchecker has completed its transition to the validation framework, and the previously deprecated UsdUtilsComplianceChecker has been fully removed. There is also a new includeKeywords option that lets users run only validators matching a specific set of keywords, making targeted validation more practical. The arkit flag has been deprecated. Finally, Python 3.8 support is deprecated as of this release and will be removed in the next. Projects still on Python 3.8 should plan to upgrade accordingly.

Availability

OpenUSD v26.03 is available on GitHub. The core non-imaging libraries can be installed via PyPI using pip install usd-core. As always, new tools and innovations should be tested before use in production. That includes performance claims, new composition behaviors, and any schema changes that can ripple through asset publishing. About two thirds into rollout planning, the safest play is to buidl a small validation suite around usdchecker, then run it on real assets before you flip any defaults.

https://aousd.org/blog/openusd-v26-03/

https://openusd.org/release/user_guides/schemas/usdVol/ParticleField3DGaussianSplat.html

The post OpenUSD v26.03 gets the SPLATS first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Maya is a core DCC for modeling, rigging, animation, FX, and rendering, with Maya Creative as a leaner sibling. It plugs into USD workflows, Arnold rendering, and FX via Bifrost, with a shortcut out to Flow Studio when you need the cloud.

The 2027 drop hits modeling, animation, FX, and pipeline

Autodesk has released Maya 2027 and Maya Creative 2027, with updates spanning modeling, character work, animation, simulation, rendering, and interoperability. Maya Creative gets the same new features as Maya except for Bifrost 3.0. A tech preview of an in-product help chatbot called Autodesk Assistant ships in this release. It searches product documentation and answers workflow questions inside the app.

Smart Bevel wants your Booleans to calm down

A new modeling feature called Smart Bevel (Also available in 3ds Max) generates bevels by following the surface shape rather than the underlying topology. That matters most when topology gets uneven, especially after Boolean modeling. The tool is positioned as producing more predictable results on irregular meshes, including at Boolean intersections, where classic bevel workflows often demand extra cleanup.

It is also non-destructive, keeping construction history so you can continue to refine the result. That makes it easier to treat beveling as part of the modeling flow, not a final bake-and-pray step.

MotionMaker teaches horses new tricks

A new horse archetype lands in MotionMaker, aimed at one of animation’s oldest time sinks: believable quadruped locomotion. The horse archetype can generate a believable base motion for horses in seconds. It covers core gait work, including trots and gallops, and it can generate transitions between them. The point is not just getting a loop, but getting the in-between that usually eats hours of tweaking, like moving from trot to catner without the rhythm falling apart. And since we only heard the phrase, but don’t know what it is: The special island Pony gait of “Tölt” isn’t covered, as far as we can see. But considering we all don’t know what that exactly is, we shouldn’t be too annoyed.

The horse joins existing motion styles for bipeds and canines inside the growing MotionMaker library. The workflow framing stays consistent: generate a base, then push performance choices yourself, like changing speed while keeping a natural gait, or adjusting action beats without rebuilding the whole setup from scratch.

If you have ever watched a horse walk cycle drift into floating-hoof limbo, you already know why this matters. Still, treat it like any new tool: test thier output on real shots before you bet a delivery on it.

Sequencer gets rebuilt for shot work, not nostalgia

The Sequencer has been modernized, with changes aimed at previs and layout artists cutting multi-shot sequences. Shot trimming and time scaling are now edge-driven interactions. You drag a shot edge to trim, and you use a time scale mode to scale by dragging the edge. The interface adds custom labels, color coding, automatic thumbnails, and smarter grouping behavior.

Playblasting gets its own menu and supports playblasting selected shots, all shots on a track, or the entire sequence. There is also a re-playblast option for a selected shot. File naming templates add support for a Scene keyword, and unsupported filename characters get replaced with underscores. A dedicated Sequencer workspace ships as well, and playblast output is described as improved with viewport-matching results, scene names, and full audio.

Bifrost 3.0 adds surface tension and scalable destruction tooling

Bifrost 3.0 introduces surface tension settings for liquid simulations, aimed at more realistic droplets and splashes at high resolution. Rigid Body Dynamics workflows also get attention, with performance improvements and a push toward procedural iteration. The destruction workflow is described as fully procedural, with the ability to adjust physics, tweak constraints, refine fractures, and re-simulate without rebuilding the setup. There is also a cloud option called Flow Wedging that can generate multiple variations in parallel directly from Bifrost.

OpenUSD authoring gets more guided inside the DCC

The release adds tools intended to simplify asset authoring for OpenUSD pipelines, where correctness and consistency matter as much as creativity. A guided workflow called Component Creator can build USD components through an interface designed to help structure assets properly from the start. A related Variant Manager helps define and manage asset variations.

On the 3ds Max side, an Asset Resolver is described as helping keep asset resolution stable by giving more control and visibility over how assets resolve and how paths map. It is framed as a way to reduce guesswork when something fails to load or appears changed. But more on Max tomorrow, it’s late.

Rendering and lookdev: speed, style, and portable graphs

Rendering updates focus on speed and creative control in Arnold, with improvements described for complex scenes and volumes like smoke or clouds, including GPU and volume rendering areas.

New shading tools include a stylised line option and a nearest points shader for point-based effects and data-driven shading. Hair is described as looking more natural in close-ups, and bloom rendering is described as more refined for realistic and stylised lens effects.

On the lookdev side, there is support for plugging third-party solutions into LookdevX for AI-driven generative texturing. This is presented as a workflow connection rather than a single locked-in generator. For interchange and portability, MaterialX workflows in LookdevX add support for relative paths in documents, with options to make paths relative to the scene file or workspace, and tools to toggle between relative and absolute paths.

Flow Studio gets a front door inside Maya

A new button in the Status Line can open Flow Studio directly from inside Maya. The release notes also call out Wonder 3D in Flow Studio, described as a generative AI model that can quickly generate 3D characters or objects from a text prompt or reference image, with export paths to Maya, 3ds Max, Blender, and Unreal Engine.

Pricing and system requirements

Maya is rental-only, with subscriptions listed at US$255 per month or US$2,010 per year. Maya Indie is listed as priced at US$330 per year for qualifying artists earning under US$100,000 per year and working on projects valued under US$100,000 per year. Maya Creative is pay-as-you-go, with pricing starting at US$3 per day and a minimum spend of US$300 per year.

Maya 2027.0 is available for Windows 11, macOS 14.0 or later, and Linux distributions including RHEL and Rocky Linux. Whatever part of the pipeline you touch, put the new features through your usual validation before they enter production, especially anything that changes core geometry, rig weighting, USD structure, or render outputs.

https://blogs.autodesk.com/media-and-entertainment/2026/03/25/whats-new-in-maya-and-3ds-max/

The post Autodesk ships Maya 2027 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Unity Studio is now officially released after a beta that started last autumn. The product sits inside a browser and targets teams that want interactive real time 3D outcomes without turning every review cycle into a software install party.

The tool frames itself as a simplified counterpart to the Unity Editor. The split reads like this. Unity Studio focuses on quick creation and sharing of interactive 3D applications in a web-based workspace. The Unity Editor covers advanced development for complex applications.

Unity Studio is designed for people who work with 3D data but do not necessarily live in code all day, including designers, artists, training and marketeers, industrial engineers, and sales teams. That audience definition matters because it shapes almost every feature choice, from visual logic blocks to one click publishing.

The interface aims for familiar, not fearless

The day to day experience centers on a canvas with panels that list project contents and expose settings and controls for building and sharing. The tutorial material breaks the UI down into a Hierarchy panel, a Project panel, a Scene view, and an Inspector panel, plus a Camera Preview for framing the final view.

Navigation and inspection are built in so you can look at scenes, models, and assets from different angles. Lighting controls exist for mood and readability, which helps when you need to communicate intent rather than chase photoreal.

Unity Studio also supports building drafts as an initial working state. Drafts and projects live in the cloud and are accessible within an organization. The asset pipeline stays tightly connected to Unity Asset Manager, which stores uploaded assets, tracks versions of drafts, and keeps a version history you can browse.

Import and formats, with a cloud converter doing extra work

Asset ingest starts with upload and import flows that pass through Unity Asset Manager. The supported formats story splits into two layers.

On the direct import side, Unity Studio supports 3D model file formats including glTF in GLB form, FBX, and OBJ, plus supported image types like PNG and JPEG and supported audio types like WAV, MP3, AIFF, AIF, and OGG.

On the conversion side, the Asset Manager can convert additional formats into supported formats. The conversion list includes CAD oriented extensions such as STEP variants, and it includes OpenUSD variants such as USD, USDA, USDC, and USDZ, plus glTF, GLB, PXZ, and others.

The asset optimization angle hooks into Unity Asset Transformer. The Asset Manager uses that tool to optimize complex industry files, including CAD assets, so you can visualize and interact with them in a web browesr without extra software installs.

There is also a size related behavior worth knowing early. When an asset exceeds 200 MB, Unity Studio uses a preview GLB file instead of the original GLB, OBJ, or FBX file for that content.

Animation and UI, built for explanation

A lot of industrial and training content needs motion because motion explains behavior. Unity Studio includes animation tools that cover individual object animation and more complex sequences. The feature overview material describes an animation director that coordinates movements on a shared timeline using keyframes, with examples like fluid flows or mechanical sequences.

UI authoring sits on a UI canvas so you can place functional interfaces directly over the 3D scene. The feature set explicitly calls out buttons, readouts, and text, and the tutorial content includes creating UI text elements as part of an interaction example. That pairing matters because a lot of review workflows depend on guided UI, not just orbit and zoom.

Material work also shows up in the tutorial path. You can create new materials and edit existing ones, and you can duplicate an imported material into an editable copy so changes apply only to a specific object.

Logic, the no code promise in one word

Interactivity in Unity Studio centers on a visual scripting system called “Logik”, uhm, no. logic. Relax, Flame-Users! The Logic editor uses a node library and a builder area where you drag and connect building blocks. The goal is to create interactive behaviors without writing code.

Publishing and sharing: the review link is the deliverable

Publishing is built into the workflow. Unity Studio publishes applications to the web, and web is currently the only available platform option. The publish flow includes selecting Publish, choosing Web, entering a title, and optionally entering a password to restrict access. Publishing generates a Project Web URL you can share.

Sharing a published project is essentially sharing that link. Anyone with the link can access the application. Updating a published application pushes the latest changes to the live version via an Update action. Unpublishing takes the application offline so it is no longer accessible via the web link.

That set of actions lines up neatly with design review reality. You send one link, you iterate, and you do not play whack a mole with new attachments every time a stakeholder asks for a different camera angle.

Use cases: HMI, configurators, simulations, training

The product messaging and documentation focus on industrial and enterprise style scenarios that benefit from fast iteration.

The tool targets HMI prototyping for automotive and industrial dashboards. It targets product configurators where teams adjust colors and swap components in real time. It also targets step by step demonstrations of machine behavior in a browser. Training apps for operators are also in scope, and the product page calls out building 3D training experiences with assets, UI instructions, and live updates.

The docs also describe building configurators, designing HMI layouts, creating step by step training scenarios, and exporting work as a web application for customers or external partners to review. Across those tasks, the common thread stays the same: interactive review, short loops, and fewer handoffs.

Pricing and quotas, with the cloud meter clearly visible

Unity Studio is priced at $799 USD per seat, per year. There is a 30 day free trial with no credit card required.

Each seat includes 120 GB of cloud storage for assets and content in Unity Asset Manager. Each organization also gets 10 GB per month of bandwidth for deployed Studio applications for Studio app hosting. Additional storage can be purchased at $0.75 per GB per month and additional bandwidth at $0.50 per GB per month.

Deployment builds and hosts the application in the company cloud so teams can access it on the web without server management. Hosting uses bandwidth, so treat published links like any other hosted deliverable and keep an eye on how widely they travel.

A production minded reality check

Unity Studio aims to shrink the distance between a 3D idea and a clickable decision. It does that with browser delivery, visual Logic, and built in publishing. Those are strong levers for review and training pipelines where time disappears into coordination rather than creation.

Still, every new tool belongs in a staging lane first. Test it with representative assets, representative reviewers, and the same network conditions you expect in the real world. New tools and innovations should always be tested before use in production.

https://unity.com/products/unity-studio// Requirements and compatibility, browser versions, WebGPU notes, mobile browser limitation

The post Unity ships Unity Studio for in-browser 3D first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: OctaneRender is a GPU renderer that sits after lookdev and before finals, and it talks fluently with DCC plugins plus OpenUSD and MaterialX, when it is in a good mood.

The alpha, the scope, the fine print

OctaneRender 2027.1 Alpha 1 is out as a public development build intended for testing by experienced users, and it is explicitly not positioned as production ready. Scenes saved in this alpha are not guaranteed to stay compatible with future builds. The build is Windows only right now, the minimum required NVIDIA driver version is 572. The downloads listed for this alpha are the standalone Windows installer and a ZIP archive. Other build types are planned for subsequent releases.

Real time neural viewport, now with thunderbolt energy

The headline feature is a new real-time neural viewport mode that replaces the previous real-time mode. It is built on the neural radiance cache framework introduced in OctaneRender 2026. The alpha describes the new mode as enabling near noise-free interactive rendering at very low sample counts compared to traditional path tracing. The mode is designed to preserve the spectral path-tracing behaviour while improving interactive feedback, even under complex lighting conditions. It combines internal research with NVIDIA DLSS Ray Reconstruction.

In the UI, the alpha notes a dedicated toggle. The real-time neural viewport can be enabled or disabled using a Thunderbolt button in the viewport components bar. Quality settings for the real-time denoiser live under the imager node, with the goal of balancing performance and quality depending on the hardware. If you have ever watched a veiwport go from soup to something readable right as a director walks over, you already know why this matters. The promise here is faster clarity, not just faster pixels.

Upscaling joins the party: DLSS and FSR modes

This alpha adds support for new up-sampling modes based on NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR. The build also references AMD FSR 3. The implementation sits in the Upsampler section of the imager node, alongside other up-sampling methods. On the DLSS side, the referenced technology page describes DLSS Ray Reconstruction as an AI method that replaces hand-tuned denoisers with an AI network that generates higher quality pixels between sampled rays in intensive ray-traced scenes. Those statements describe DLSS generally, not a specific Octane integration result. This renderer is CUDA based, and the Windows alpha focuses on NVIDIA GPUs (Big surprise!).

AI Light 2.0: sampling that tries harder

AI Light 2.0 lands as a new light sampling method intended to resolve noise faster. AI Light is described as a hierarchical algorithm for sampling scenes with many light sources, and the update is positioned as a major revision compared to the original introduction back in OctaneRender 4.0.

For lighting heavy setups, this is the kind of change that can alter how fast you converge on creative decisions. If your daily routine includes juggling dozens of practicals, emissive set dressing, and a few too many hero gobos, any sampling improvement tends to show up right where it hurts, in the first minutes of iteration.

USD export and a more hands on USD workflow

OpenUSD workflows get a concrete upgrade. Geometry export to USD is included, and the build adds the ability to export a scene in USD format. The cgchannel overview also notes that geometry export in USD can include limited support for USD Preview Surface materials.

On the editing side, the standalone edition includes a USD Stage editor that allows selecting variants and layers without saving and reopening the USD file. The alpha also adds built in support for authoring variants and muting USD layers directly within the USD geometry archive.

If your pipeline already treats USD as a transport layer between layout, lookdev, lighting, and downstream tools, these changes aim straight at friction. More export options reduce the number of awkward handoffs that turn into late night chat messages that start with “hey quick question….”

UVs and geometry: more room for messy reality

The UV ceiling changes, because production UVs are never as polite as tool demos. The maximum number of UV maps allowed per primitive increases to 10, up from 3, and UV sets can be assigned arbitrary names in DCC apps that support it.

Other geometry and attribute changes include support for named UV vertex attributes, support for using vertex attributes in bump maps, support for colour vertex attributes in vertex displacement, and a Vectron tube primitive addition.

If you have ever inherited an asset with five UV sets and a note that says do not touch UV4, you now have more breathing room. The named UV support also helps keep humans oriented when the same mesh carries multiple UV purposes across shading, decals, and baking.

Changelog nuggets for TDs who read release notes for fun

Beyond new features, the alpha lists a spread of resolved issues and smaller changes. A few examples include fixes around DDS preference crashes, Alembic instancing, several MaterialX node behaviors, and multiple OpenUSD import issues such as points not loading correctly and animated point instances importing incorrectly.

The Lua API gets deprecations in geometry exporter properties, including moving from renderSizeX and renderSizeY to textureRenderWidth and textureRenderHeight, and replacing writeOcsData with embedNativeData. A small UI level tweak removes Clock Rate and Cores fields from the GPU information panel. This is where you start thinking about tool glue. If you have scripts that poke exporter properties or automate export settings, the deprecations are your early warning sign to check for breakage.

Availability, licensing, and pricing

This alpha is available alongside the stable OctaneRender 2026 releases. The software is offered as rental only via Studio+ subscriptions. The pricing listed is €23.95 per month or €239.88 per year, and the Studio+ subscription page also lists an annual price presented as 19.99 € per month billed yearly.

Free Prime editions are also available for OctaneRender and Octane X, with the Prime editions limited to rendering on a single GPU and offering a smaller set of DCC integration plugins. The alpha download links themselves require a licensed customer login for access. That is where OTOY enters the picture in the most practical way possible.

Production reality check

This build is explicitly framed as experimental, and it is not recommended for production use. That guidance aligns with the normal alpha reality: features change, files drift, and stability work continues in later builds.

New tools and innovations should always be tested before use in production, ideally on representative scenes with your actual assets, shading conventions, and deadline pressure.

What to watch while you test

The big workflow test is whether the neural viewport mode makes iteration measurably smoother on your scenes, and whether AI Light 2.0 shifts your sampling strategy. The second test is whether USD export plus USD Stage editing reduces round-trip times in YOUR pipeline. The third is whether the DLSS and FSR upsampler options behave predictably inside your lookdev and review loop, especially when you rely on consistent framing and visual stability.

https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=85551

The post OctaneRender 2027.1 alpha goes neural first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Manuel Kotulla.

Let’s start the year with something long overdue: The Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) has released OpenUSD Core Specification 1.0, establishing the first formally ratified, production-ready core standard for OpenUSD. The specification defines the foundational behavior of OpenUSD, including how scene data is structured, composed, resolved, and exchanged across tools.

Rather than introducing new features, the Core Specification documents and standardises existing OpenUSD fundamentals as a normative reference. Its stated purpose is to reduce ambiguity between implementations and provide a shared baseline for interoperability across DCCs, engines, and pipeline tools.

A normative foundation for OpenUSD

According to AOUSD, Core Specification 1.0 defines the minimum required behavior software must implement to claim OpenUSD compliance. This includes formal rules for syntax, composition, and deterministic value resolution. By moving these definitions from implicit behavior to an explicit specification, AOUSD aims to reduce fragmentation and ensure that OpenUSD scenes behave consistently when transferred between applications. The specification is explicitly positioned as foundational, with future standards expected to build on top of it rather than redefining core mechanics.

What the Core Specification defines

OpenUSD Core Specification 1.0 standardises six core technical areas.

• It defines grammar and data types, specifying the formal language rules and primitive data representations used by OpenUSD.
• It introduces a document data model that describes how scene data is structured independently of file format.
• The specification provides a normative description of the composition algorithm, defining how multiple USD layers are combined non-destructively into a composed scene.
• It formalises stage population and value resolution, ensuring predictable construction of scene graphs and deterministic resolution of authored values.
• It defines file format specifications for USDA, USDC, and USDZ, covering text-based, binary, and packaged OpenUSD data.
• Finally, it introduces a compliance framework with conformance criteria and reference tests that allow developers to validate implementations against the specification.

Implications for production pipelines

For studios and pipeline developers, the Core Specification provides a clear technical contract for OpenUSD behavior. Tools that conform to the specification should interpret layering, composition, and value resolution in the same way, reducing ambiguity when assets move between applications.

The scope of the release is intentionally limited. The Core Specification does not define materials, animation semantics, physics, or rendering behavior. These areas are expected to be addressed by future AOUSD working groups through layered specifications built on top of the core.

Compliance and roadmap

Alongside the specification, AOUSD provides compliance tests and reference materials intended to support validation of conforming implementations. This enables vendors to verify behavior against a shared standard rather than relying on informal compatibility.

AOUSD has indicated that future revisions will extend the specification incrementally while maintaining compatibility with Core Specification 1.0. Follow-up releases are expected to refine compliance testing and expand coverage without altering the foundational behavior defined in this release.

With Core Specification 1.0, OpenUSD transitions from a widely adopted technology to a formally standardised foundation, establishing a stable base for vendor-neutral interoperability across 3D production pipelines.

AOUSD Official Announcement
https://aousd.org/news/core-spec-announcement/

AOUSD Blog: Foundations of Open 3D Development
https://aousd.org/blog/foundations-of-open-3d-development-introducing-aousd-core-specification-1-0/

The post AOUSD Releases OpenUSD Core Specification 1.0 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Together with Paul Kanyuk (Crowd TD at Pixar Animation Studios), we’ll look into the backstory of USDSkel, including how he became involved in its development.

Put simply: UsdSkel is Pixar’s USD module for defining and animating skeletal rigs—complete with schemas (structure), queries (reading), and APIs (writing and manipulation). It’s a bridge between your DCC (Digital Content Creation) tools and USD pipelines, ensuring skinned meshes and joint animations can move smoothly across different tools and engines: OpenUSD.

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Why It Might Matter to Your Workflow

If you’re working with rigged characters, skeletal animations, or skinned meshes, understanding UsdSkel gives you the power to:

• Implement or tweak performance-sensitive parts like caching skeleton data or remapping joints.
• Export rigs from tools like Maya or Blender into USD while preserving joint structure and animations.
• Bind skeletons to geometry and control joint influences programmatically.
• Efficiently reuse skeleton definitions through instancing, thanks to USD’s layer system.
• Query skeleton and animation data within custom USD tools or pipelines.

Watch the FULL event

The post USDSkel: Optimized Character Rigging first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Alexander Richter.

Foundry has released Nuke Stage, a standalone software solution for virtual production and in-camera visual effects (ICVFX). It is designed to integrate pre-production, on-set workflows, and post-production, providing real-time playback of photorealistic content onto LED walls, live compositing, and compatibility with OpenUSD, OpenEXR, and OpenColorIO.

Virtual Production Without Additional Dependencies

Nuke Stage functions as a standalone application, eliminating the need for game engines, specialist media servers, or proprietary hardware. It operates independently on existing hardware setups and supports synchronization across render node clusters, making it adaptable to different stage sizes.

Real-Time Compositing with a Node-Based System

The software includes a node-graph-based compositing toolkit, similar to Nuke, allowing for real-time manipulation of physical and virtual elements. It supports playback of 2D, 2.5D, and 3D imagery on LED walls, ensuring that on-set visuals align with production requirements.

Color Pipeline and Format Support

Nuke Stage integrates OpenColorIO and HDR, maintaining a linear color pipeline to ensure consistency across pre-production, on-set visualization, and post-production. The software’s file format support includes OpenUSD and OpenEXR, aligning with industry standards for VFX production.

Industry Reactions

Industry professionals have commented on Nuke Stage’s potential applications. Dan Hall (80six) highlights its role in improving communication between VFX and virtual production teams. Sam Kemp (Garden Studios) notes the benefits of incorporating compositing tools into real-time workflows, while Connor Ling (Framestore) points out that integration with Nuke’s existing workflow could help maintain consistency between on-set visuals and final VFX outputs.

Integrated Workflow for Virtual Production

Nuke Stage provides a single pipeline that supports asset consistency from pre-production through post-production. By centralizing creative control, it aims to reduce iteration time and the risk of rework.

Availability

Nuke Stage is available for early access. More details and registration information can be found on Foundry’s website. As with any new tool, testing is recommended before deployment in production workflows. And yes, having that the day after April first makes us a little suspicious, but… NAB is on the Horizon.

The post Nuke Stage: Foundry Introduces a Virtual Production Tool first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

In a release that reads like a well-oiled changelog for the production geek in all of us, OpenUSD 25.02—detailed in the official GitHub changelog—delivers a series of technical enhancements that should put a smile on the face of technical directors, VFX supervisors and artists with a penchant for finely tuned pipelines.

Enhanced API Functionality and Robustness
At the heart of version 25.02 lies a set of API refinements designed to streamline interactions with core USD components. The update tightens API definitions, which not only reduces ambiguity but also enforces stricter type and reference checks during scene description and composition. The refined API now provides more predictable behavior when dealing with asset references and payloads, making it easier for production tools to interface with USD data without running afoul of subtle bugs. In other words, if your production pipeline has been occasionally temperamental during those edge-case compositions, this update promises a steadier hand.

Performance Optimizations for Demanding Pipelines
OpenUSD 25.02 introduces optimizations in the internal memory management and parsing routines, including improved handling of composition arcs and more efficient processing of scene graph data. This means faster scene assembly and reduced latency in multi-threaded environments—a critical upgrade for professionals juggling simultaneous VFX, CGI, and realtime graphics tasks.

Multi-threading and Stability Improvements
One of the unsung heroes of this release is the bolstering of multi-threading support. The update incorporates modifications that enhance thread safety across various USD modules. These changes are particularly welcome for technical directors who rely on parallel processing. By addressing race conditions and synchronizing access to shared resources more effectively, OpenUSD 25.02 reduces the potential for crashes and erratic behavior during high-intensity production tasks. It’s a bit like giving your production pipeline an espresso shot—everything runs faster and more reliably.

Refinements in Memory Management and Error Handling
Stability in production tools is non-negotiable, and the new release addresses this by refining memory allocation routines and error-handling mechanisms. Specific improvements include better cleanup of transient data and more robust error propagation when unexpected conditions occur. Such changes might seem dry, but for those who have ever spent an afternoon debugging a memory leak in a critical render pass, these tweaks are as welcome as an extra cup of coffee during a crunch. The tighter control over memory management means that production systems can now better handle the rigors of large-scale scene manipulations, reducing downtime caused by unexpected crashes or memory overruns.

While these technical improvements are certainly designed to integrate seamlessly into production environments, it is always recommended to conduct thorough tests within controlled pipelines before deploying any new version into active projects. As always, any innovation should be checked before being used in current projects.

For those eager to dive into the specifics, the detailed changelog provides a comprehensive list of modifications and fixes. As always, while the technical merits of these improvements are impressive, ensure that the new release is validated within your workflow. After all, even the best tools require a bit of cautious integration before they can be trusted with your most demanding projects.

Happy rendering—and may your API calls always return the expected results! (Link to the Github)

The post OpenUSD 25.02: Technical Tweaks for the Speedy Frame Wrangler (Yes, Really) first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The declaration of intent to “promote the standardisation, development and distribution of the Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) technology” of the Disney/Pixar technology is now also to be adopted by sectors outside the film industry, and presumably to settle various interoperability disputes.

Euphemistically, the “Alliance was created to provide a primary forum for the industry to jointly define and advance OpenUSD capabilities to support the widespread use of 3D content. OpenUSD is used for industrial simulation applications such as digital twins of factories and realistic AR experiences”.

The alliance will now first develop binding specifications that describe OpenUSD in detail in order to enable greater compatibility and “broader acceptance, integration and implementation, and allow inclusion in the specifications of other standardisation bodies”. The Linux Foundation, with its good connections to the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), was brought on board. You can find more information about the AOUSD and how to get involved at www.aousd.org. Or see the Academy Software Foundation’s panel on USD on 6 August 2023 at opensourcedays2023.sched.com/event/1O8hA

The post Here comes OpenUSD first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.