Pixar Animation Studios has been entertaining us for years, inspiring audiences and filmmakers alike with its level of creativity and high-quality animation. And now Pixar fans will have help making their own animated shorts and films because Pixar plans to release a new open-source tool that is expected to roll out in the summer of 2016.

Pixar previously released its in-house animation software called RenderMan for free for noncommercial use. This time its Universal Scene Description open-source software will help animators and filmmakers better streamline production since the tool allows them to input from animation apps to combine objects into one "scene graph."

"USD is the marriage of Presto's 'composition engine' to lazy-access cached scene description, with top-to-bottom enhancements for scalability and leverage of today's multicore systems effectively," says Sebastian Grassia, lead engineer for the USD project, in a press release. It lets studios assemble and modify highly complex virtual scenes created with different digital content creation tools more easily.

The open-source tool will include embeddable 3D visualization via the GPU renderer Hydra, plugins for several visual effects digital content creation tools (VFX DCCs), tutorials, and Python bindings.

Pixar is still developing and optimizing USD, but has already began sharing snapshots with studios and vendors like The Foundry and Fabric Software for feedback.

While the tool will provide an industry standard, it may come later then expected since Pixar announced RenderMan, the renderer to create complicated 3D images, in June 2014, but it wasn't released until March 2015.

Via: The Verge

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