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.
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 a web-based parser and viewer for the USD format.
For 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.
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). And while its origins are…