Book of Universal Scene Description (USD)

FYI… the latest version of Nuke supports USD to what appears to be a very significant degree. The significance is that it narrows the gap between 2D captured footage and 3D generated material. It could eventually lead to a whole new way of thinking about the VFX pipeline.

For those that don’t know it, Nuke is a compositor, similar in function to after effects, but about one billion times more powerful. Also… more geared towards vfx as opposed to motion graphics.

Check it out… https://campaigns.foundry.com/products/nuke-family/whats-new

Today I taught after effects to first year students. I told them that compositors might move from After Effects to Nuke, but the only way to get a Nuke artist to move to After Effcts is by holding a gun to their head.

Btw… not a shill, just a fan boy.

Really would love to see some native web impls of USD. Nvidia & Autodesk have both spent some effort moving towards an emscripten build of the canonical project.

But there's also things like a long running ticket for a three.js loader. Full support in alternate implementations seems unlikely in the remainder of this decade, imo, but getting a healthy start wpuld be great.

USD keeps getting called the "language of the metaverse" or similar... yeah, like, imo, the metaverse should have some web interop, web capabilities.

USD is a very complex standard. Is there a layered 3D/animation interchange format that allows for relatively painless scene interchange?

By layered I mean something where each feature builds on the previous features. Something like:

1) OBJ-like static geometry 2) materials and lighting 3) per-frame transform matrices 4) animation curves 5) etc.

there is no scene.

just electrons.

:)