PNY has sponsored this article.
In today’s exponentially changing digital world, seamlessly managing and rendering intricate 3D scenes has become imperative for product designers, engineers, CAE specialists, filmmakers and visual effects artists, among others. Hardware and software advancements are jointly uplifting the significance of 3D graphics across a variety of industries, and one of the most impactful is a standard called OpenUSD. The collaborative synergy of OpenUSD will shape the future of 3D content creation.
What is OpenUSD?
Developed by Pixar Animation Studios and now open-sourced, Universal Scene Description is now referred to as OpenUSD. It provides layered composition which enables non-destructive editing by allowing users to overlay modifications on base data without disruption. OpenUSD interoperability ensures smooth data exchange across 3D software tools, providing a unified 3D workflow. OpenUSD’s extensibility offers a rich API for developers to craft custom tools or plugins for improved integration and enhanced functionality for the interchange and manipulation of complex 3D scenes across multiple software applications.
OpenUSD isn’t just a file format. It’s a comprehensive technology, platform and ecosystem providing interoperability to empower 3D creativity and visualization at all scales across any engineering discipline (along with architecture, DCC, media and entertainment (M&E), or scientific and technical computing). OpenUSD provides an extensible framework for describing, composing, simulating and collaboratively navigating and constructing 3D models, scenes or simulations. It gives developers and content creators the ability to broaden interoperability across content tools, data types, workflows and platforms. OpenUSD is being embraced by numerous industries beyond M&E, including architecture, engineering, construction, automotive and manufacturing.
How OpenUSD and NVIDIA are advancing the frontiers of graphics and collaboration
OpenUSD is a strategic move that bridges the gap between high-level scene description and GPU-optimized rendering. NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs), for example, are designed to handle intense computational tasks, making them ideal for 3D rendering, machine learning and real-time simulations—singularly or simultaneously with each other. With ubiquitous broadband, OpenUSD provides remote collaboration for geographically distributed workgroups or product development teams.
OpenUSD supports:
Layered Composition: It enables non-destructive editing by allowing architects, artists, designers or engineers to overlay modifications on base data without any disruptions.
Real-time ray tracing with NVIDIA RTX™ GPUs: NVIDIA’s RTX Ada Lovelace GPU architecture, known for its real-time ray tracing capabilities, benefits from OpenUSD’s structured scene description. By understanding the scene’s hierarchical composition, RTX optimizes ray traversal and enhances rendering speeds, producing photorealistic images directly from CAD or other design files.
NVIDIA Omniverse™ Enterprise: This is a collaborative platform designed for creators and built on top of OpenUSD. It harnesses the power of NVIDIA RTX GPUs to allow multiple users to collaborate in real-time within a shared virtual environment, dramatically enhancing creative and design workflows.
GPU-Accelerated rendering: With scene data described by USD and the computational prowess of NVIDIA RTX GPUs with CUDA, RT and Tensor Cores, developers can achieve GPU-accelerated rendering along with physically accurate simulation—all with an AI assist. This allows for quicker iterations, enabling architects, artists, designers or engineers to visualize changes in real-time.
AI-enhanced graphics: The extensibility of OpenUSD allows users to integrate the latest AI tools and most popular BIM, CAD or other 3D modeling programs into their custom 3D workflows.
Optimized asset interchange: Creative professionals, product designers and engineers frequently shift between tools for modeling, texturing, animation, lighting or design, simulation and validation. OpenUSD-based integration ensures that asset interchange is smooth, devoid of data loss and optimized for GPU rendering.
NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation and NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise bundle
The NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation is the ultimate board for implementing demanding NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise workflows. Based on the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture, the RTX 6000 delivers 3x the rendering performance and 2.5x the AI inferencing performance of its Gen-2 counterpart. PNY (through NVIDIA) now offers a bundle that includes a full NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise license bundled with the RTX 6000, opening new pathways to Omniverse-based real-time collaboration at previously unobtainable performance levels.
Continued collaboration between OpenUSD and NVIDIA
The OpenUSD and NVIDIA RTX combination is paving the way for advancements. With standardized scene description and optimized rendering pipelines, corporations, manufacturers, researchers or studios can expect more unified and efficient workflows leading to faster project turnarounds.
NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise’s real-time collaboration redefines how teams operate, breaking geographical barriers and enabling instant feedback loops. With the continuous improvement of NVIDIA RTX GPU technologies and corresponding performance and capabilities, along with the structured approach of OpenUSD, adopters can anticipate higher visual fidelity in films, product design or scientific and technical visual environments, including those utilizing AR, VR or XR.
Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD)
Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk and NVIDIA formed the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), an open, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the interoperability of 3D content through OpenUSD. Standardizing the 3D ecosystem will enable developers and content creators to simulate large-scale 3D projects while building an ever-widening range of 3D-enabled products and services. Part of the Joint Development Foundation, the Alliance brings together a diverse and inclusive community of participants to provide an open forum for collaborative development and discussion around OpenUSD.
A foundational goal is to provide a written specification for OpenUSD core functionality. This not only allows the development of diverse and compatible OpenUSD implementations, but also enables other standards to reference OpenUSD in support of their technology initiatives.
AOUSD serves as a key focal point for the coordinated development of new OpenUSD functionality by members and is committed to pursuing collaborative relationships with other organizations and standards bodies in the 3D ecosystem. For new functionality where a reference implementation doesn’t already exist in the Pixar OpenUSD community, AOUSD will provide a repository to house reference implementations. As the definition of essential OpenUSD functionality expands over time, new features can be added.
The synergies realized by OpenUSD, NVIDIA RTX, NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise, and other APIs, SDKs, sample code, and optimized development tools exemplifies the perfect blend of software and hardware working in tandem. As the 3D graphics industry continues to advance, and significant facets of product design and engineering continue their relentless pursuit of realism, efficiency and interactivity, collaborative OpenUSD-based workflows will emerge as a pillar of contemporary visual computing. By enabling users such as product designers and engineers to realize their visions more effortlessly, this synergy is setting new benchmarks for the world of digital content creation and product design, from computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided engineering (CAE), to file generated design review photorealistic visuals, to more interactive and portable simulations that are vital to the product development process.
For additional information, explore NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise at pny.com.