“UsdShade in the Pixar Pipeline” by Hecht, McCoy, Lavietes and Grassia
Conference:
Type(s):
Entry Number: 44
Title:
- UsdShade in the Pixar Pipeline
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Abstract:
The VFX and animation industry is widely adopting Pixar’s USD (Universal Scene Description) format to describe and manipulate scene information throughout production of CG content. A key part to a complete description of a scene is the representation of shading of all the parts, which is the description of materials that will be used to render it. UsdShade is the submodule of USD that is designed to handle material description. UsdShade was developed at Pixar in 2014 during the production of Finding Dory and has been used on all following productions. Since then we have learned a lot and have refined our practices to get the most out of UsdShade. We want to share our best practices and learnings to guide others to great success in using UsdShade in their pipelines.
References:
Dave Dixon, Matt Johnson, Andy Whittock, Peter Roe, Jamie Hecker, and Matt Kuruc. 2020. Procedural Geometry with Open Shading Language on Pixar’s Onward and Soul. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA.
