LogInThe studio's Kristof Minnaert has shared a detailed blog post, explaining how they plan to transition to Universal Scene Description.
Principal Technical Artist/Pipeline Lead at Remedy Entertainment Kristof Minnaert has recently shared a comprehensive blog post, revealing that the studio's proprietary engine Northlight will soon support Pixar's Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD), a system for authoring, reading, and streaming time-sampled scene description for interchange between graphics applications.
In the blog post, Minnaert explained the studio's decision to include OpenUSD into its content creation pipelines, saying that Universal Scene Description will help them "maintain the same level of fidelity yet enable parallel editing workflows between artists".
Furthermore, the artist provided insights into the studio's strategy for migrating to OpenUSD, saying that they decided to embrace an OpenUSD plug-in solution, which is expected to greatly facilitate the transition for Remedy's pipeline and content teams, making it a more seamless process.
"We're writing plugins for OpenUSD that can read data formats that we currently use, such as Autodesk FBX. Such plugins will allow the use of our current file formats within OpenUSD as-is," Minnaert wrote in the blog post. "The plugins are responsible for taking format-specific data and outputting OpenUSD data, effectively enabling the OpenUSD conversion process to operate on these formats as if they were native OpenUSD."
Lastly, the artist announced that Remedy's usdFBX OpenUSD plug-in has been open-sourced and is now available for free via GitHub.
"Even though Northlight is our own proprietary tech, we want to keep true to the spirit of Free Open Source Software that OpenUSD is – we are happy to announce that we are open-sourcing our usdFBX OpenUSD plugin. We hope it can serve as a basis (or drop-in solution!) for your pipeline migration into OpenUSD," commented Minnaert.
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