WRAPPING UP USD ADDRESSES THE TECHNICAL PROBLEM OF GEOMETRY REPRESENTATION AND INTERCHANGE BETWEEN APPLICATIONS
USD AND RENDERMAN
Renderman has several integration points with USD. The most obvious is that Renderman provides a Hydra Renderer Delegate for plugging into Hydra. This allows for Renderman to be used as a renderer with any application that supports switching delegates, such as usdview, which ships with USD, or Houdini’s Solaris. Renderman is able to render geometry, materials, and lights straight from Hydra.
Renderman has also served as the inspiration for many of the schemas within USD, such as the schema for lights.
As both USD and Renderman evolve, we on the Renderman team will continue to more deeply integrate USD support and ingestion to the renderer.
EVOLUTION OF USD
USD continues to evolve to meet the needs of sophisticated pipelines and toolsets. The USD development team at Pixar is continuously pushing USD to provide more flexibility in how it drives production rendering. The backbone of our geometry and shading pipeline is USD. We are working to define additional features that will give it the flexibility we need to drive our complex lighting setups via USD and Hydra through to Renderman.
Another area that many studios are interested in is proceduralism. Studios want a standard way to represent and expand procedurals for geometry creation, as well as for scene manipulation at the moment geometry, materials and lights are passed to the renderer. Proceduralism is always an active topic of conversation and it will take time and a lot of due diligence for full proceduralism to be added to USD and Hydra. One of the key design principles of USD is to deliver a high-performing system and renderer. Any foray into a deeper level of proceduralism must be done carefully in order to make sure that a high level of performance is maintained.
USD modernises how scene data is represented and managed for today’s production pipelines, and is currently transforming pipelines across the animation and visual effects industry. USD addresses the technical problem of geometry representation and interchange between applications while at the same time providing a high-performance system, artist collaboration via non-destructive layer composition, and the ability for renderers like Renderman to plug into the USD ecosystem.
As the DCC vendors like Autodesk, Foundry and Sidefx continue to embrace USD and its many benefits, you will continue to see its usage grow throughout our industry. In the next few years, if you haven’t already, you will find yourself working directly with USD and able to take advantage of its power, flexibility, and other features for modern pipelines. •