OpenUSD

Universal Scene Description is an open and extensible ecosystem for 3D worlds.

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Building Interoperable 3D Workflows With OpenUSD

Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) is more than just a file format. It’s an open and extensible ecosystem for describing, composing, simulating, and collaborating within 3D worlds.

Invented by Pixar Animation Studio, OpenUSD encompasses a collection of fundamental tools and capabilities that accelerate workflows, teams, and projects, whether you’re creating assets and environments for large-scale, AI-enabled virtual worlds or building the tools to make these worlds possible.

The Benefits of OpenUSD

Extensible

Provides an open, extensible framework and ecosystem with APIs for composing, editing, querying, rendering, collaborating, and simulating within 3D virtual worlds.

Non-Destructive

Enables non-destructive workflows and collaboration in scene creation and asset aggregation so teams can iterate together.

Collaborative

Is file system agnostic, providing an extensible asset resolver to support any data storage model and allow for disparate data sources. 

Customizable

Supports custom renderers in a generalized pipeline thanks to its Hydra rendering architecture that provides flexibility in visualizing data.

Alliance for OpenUSD

NVIDIA, Pixar, Adobe, Apple, and Autodesk co-founded the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), an open, nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the interoperability of 3D content through OpenUSD.

Join us to shape the future of OpenUSD in Working Groups, participate in Interest Groups, or engage with the community in the AOUSD forums.

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Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD)

Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA have formed AOUSD, an open, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the interoperability of 3D content through OpenUSD.

Evangelizing OpenUSD

AOUSD fosters the standardization, development, evolution, and growth of OpenUSD to empower developers and content creators across the 3D ecosystem.

Read the AOUSD Blogs

Becoming a Member

Join AOUSD to help standardize the 3D ecosystem and define the structure and future features of OpenUSD.

Join the Alliance
Universal Scene Description describes geometries, materials, physics, and behavior representations of 3D worlds and is the best open and extensible standard language for the 3D internet.

— Jensen Huang, CEO, NVIDIA

NVIDIA’s contributions to help evolve USD as the open foundation of fully interoperable 3D platforms will be a great benefit across industries.

— Steve May, CTO, Pixar Animation Studios

Beyond media and entertainment, USD will give 3D artists, designers, developers and others the ability to work collaboratively across diverse workflows and applications as they build virtual worlds.

— Rev Lebaredian, Vice President of Omniverse and Simulation Technology, NVIDIA

Universal Scene Description describes geometries, materials, physics, and behavior representations of 3D worlds and is the best open and extensible standard language for the 3D internet.

— Jensen Huang, CEO, NVIDIA

NVIDIA’s contributions to help evolve USD as the open foundation of fully interoperable 3D platforms will be a great benefit across industries.

— Steve May, CTO, Pixar Animation Studios

Beyond media and entertainment, USD will give 3D artists, designers, developers and others the ability to work collaboratively across diverse workflows and applications as they build virtual worlds.

— Rev Lebaredian, Vice President of Omniverse and Simulation Technology, NVIDIA

Built on OpenUSD

Pushing the Limits of OpenUSD

NVIDIA continues to accelerate USD’s evolution for use cases beyond visual effects (VFX), testing the limits of the USD ecosystem through industrial, robotics, and AI applications.

NVIDIA Omniverse

NVIDIA Omniverse™ is a platform of APIs and SDKs that enable developers to build applications for complex 3D and industrial digitalization workflows based on OpenUSD.

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NVIDIA Isaac Sim

Based on USD, NVIDIA Isaac Sim™ is a scalable robotics simulation application framework and synthetic data-generation tool that powers physically accurate virtual environments to develop, test, and manage AI-based robots.

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OpenUSD SimReady Assets

USD serves as the foundation for simulation-ready assets—advanced 3D assets with physical properties that let them behave like they would in the real world.

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NVIDIA’s Work in OpenUSD

Latest Contributions

NVIDIA is expanding development of OpenUSD to help our industrial and scientific communities build large-scale, physically accurate digital twins. We’re also investing in OpenUSD to include many future capabilities, such as geospatial coordinates, connections to the glTF file format, real-time proceduralism, the ability to run in web browsers, and real-time streaming of IoT data.

Material Definition Language (MDL)

MDL lets you easily share physically based materials between supporting applications.

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USD Physics

Watch a technical deep dive into the rigid body physics extension to USD with a real-time simulation demonstration in NVIDIA Omniverse.

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Python 3 Bindings

Omniverse Kit uses the Python 3 async API to safely load and save assets between Omniverse servers and the local file system.

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Prebuilt USD Binaries

NVIDIA provides prebuilt USD binaries for Windows and Linux to accelerate developer workflows.

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Get Started With OpenUSD

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On-Demand

Introduction to OpenUSD

Watch the OpenUSD Series
On-Demand

Learn the OpenUSD Basics

Watch Introduction to USD
Self-Paced

Learn OpenUSD Fundamentals

Enroll in the OpenUSD Course

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Platform SDK

For developers looking to build an application from scratch, NVIDIA offers Omniverse SDKs and free developer sample applications that can be easily customized and extended. You can then containerize for local or self-hosted cloud usage​, or host and stream from Omniverse Cloud.

Download SDK Now
Try Enterprise Supported 30 Day Trial

Cloud APIs

Omniverse core technologies for OpenUSD and RTX are exposed as simple APIs that developers can self-host or use as a managed service.

Coming soon to Microsoft Azure. 

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