using the same codebase and behaviour in the future. It also opens up the possibility of using native USD extensions for physics, MaterialX etc. The beauty of the third approach is that having the USD scene graph and Hydra’s rendering abstraction available – not just the import of the USD file format itself – opens up the possibility of implementing editing and interactive workflows in the browser with USD at their core. Not only has the team added WebAssembly as a compile target for the USD toolkit, they’ve added a new Hydra render delegate called hdJavaScript that targets a THREE.js render delegate, as well as JavaScript bindings for USD that will allow JS devs to read and manipulate USD scenes directly. The team – Roland Ruiters-Christou, Sebastian Dunkel, Aura Munoz, Philipp Frericks, Cedrick Munstermann and Kai – figured out how not only to have USD target a new architecture – using Emscripten to build WebAssembly binaries – but to have USD support 32-bit memory addressing, allowing it to be loaded by browsers once packaged via WebAssembly. In the end, despite the blocker, option 3 proved to be the most attractive to explore more deeply. The biggest blocker was that USD requires 64-bit memory addressing, while browsers currently only support 32-bit addressing for WASM.Initially concerned about the size of the resultant binaries.Absolutely feasible for static scenes, but hard to maintain over time (and also very tricky when dealing with physics, etc.). This would unfortunately mean certain valuable features from USD – such as those relating to collaboration – would be lost.Translate USD to glTF, which already has widespread support on the web.They considered three main approaches for making this happen: The Visualization team’s efforts in this area revolve around the desire to take the largely C++-based USD implementation to work well with the web. The best way to get a sense of Autodesk’s work on this project is to watch this video of Kai Schröder presenting the project to the USD working group. Aside from 3ds Max and Maya, Fusion 360 also exports to USD. And while its origins are in film-making, the format clearly has huge potential for other industries needing high-fidelity 3D representations. What’s possibly most interesting about USD is that it’s highly composable: you can build up scenes or assemblies to an arbitrary level from more primitive elements (assets, parts or sub-assemblies). One of the most interesting projects to come through the committee – at least from my perspective – has now been released into the wild: Autodesk’s Visualization team (who also develop the Forge viewer) has open-sourced an implementation of the USD toolkit that targets the web.įor those of you unfamiliar with USD – and I’m talking about the file format, not the currency – it stands for Universal Scene Description, and is a core part of Pixar’s 3D graphics pipeline that they chose to open-source themselves several years ago. I’ve been part of Autodesk’s open source committee – responsible for driving and approving open source contributions by the company – as the representative for Autodesk Research for the last few years.
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