Here’s how USD works, and how you can see it in operation by trialling NVIDIA Omniverse for free.
In the past month at befores & afters we’ve been showcasing Escape Technology’s free 3 month trial of NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise alongside Teradici, with the purchase of a qualifying HP desktop or mobile workstation.
Regular readers may already know about NVIDIA Omniverse, but you may not be fully aware of the underlying technology that makes Omniverse possible: it’s Universal Scene Description, or USD. And it’s a technology that emanated from Pixar.
USD and Omniverse: working together
Pixar’s USD is essentially an open source framework for the interchange of 3D data among different digital content creation apps. The ones you know about in VFX and animation–Autodesk’s Maya, SideFX’s Houdini, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, Adobe’s Substance suite and Foundry’s Katana–are already large scale adopters of USD.
The idea is to make it easier to push data around between the apps, something that can otherwise be an incredibly time consuming process to manage. Since USD encompasses a complete specification for 3D scene content, that is, not specializing in, say, only geometry translation or animation transfer, it is quickly gaining user interest as the most complete and most robust way to move data around a multi-product tool chain.
NVIDIA’s Omniverse has also adopted USD, along with NVIDIA RTX technology, with the intention of aiding in the same kind of efficient data flows between apps, as well as enabling complex, and seamless, workflows for digital studios and artists, regardless of where they are located.
That’s because Omniverse is all about allowing artists to simultaneously work in real-time across software platforms (by relying on USD and RTX). You can create and iterate on CG assets together, review dailies together and make edits together, from just about any location.
You might be located in one country, your colleagues elsewhere, but the data will be in a central place, controlled with Omniverse tools. That’s better version control and security, already.
Complex tasks such as dealing with ray tracing, simulation, and MDL—a library of physically based materials for photorealistic feature film-quality content–are made possible with Omniverse. The USD side of things also enables them to be done via simultaneous collaboration among large teams in different departments across different pieces of software.
Find out first-hand how USD and Omniverse can help you work
Purchase a qualifying HP desktop or mobile workstation via Escape Technology, and you’ll be able to access the free 3 month trial of NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise and remote workstation software solution Teradici CAS software.
Find out more by heading to Escape Technology’s detailed information page.
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This article is part of the befores & afters VFX Insight series. If you’d like to promote your VFX/animation/CG tech or service, you can find out more about the VFX Insight series here.
