NVIDIA Reveals New Resources to Accelerate OpenUSD Adoption

Newly announced Omniverse Cloud APIs include ChatUSD, Run USD, DeepSearch and USD-GDN Publisher, giving developers more power to seamlessly implement and deploy OpenUSD pipelines and apps.

NVIDIA has announced a range of frameworks, resources, and services for developers and companies to accelerate the adoption of Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD). The company is advancing the development of OpenUSD — a 3D framework enabling interoperability between software tools and data types for the building of virtual worlds — through NVIDIA Omniverse and a new portfolio of technologies and cloud application programming interfaces (APIs) — including ChatUSD and RunUSD — along with a new NVIDIA OpenUSD Developer Program.

Learn more about OpenUSD, its ecosystem of connections, AOUSD, and the NVIDIA Omniverse platform from today’s SIGGRAPH keynote by company founder and CEO Jensen Huang.

These investments in OpenUSD expand on NVIDIA’s co-founding of the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) — an organization announced last week that will standardize OpenUSD specifications — along with Pixar, Adobe, Apple, and Autodesk.

“Just as HTML ignited a major computing revolution of the 2D internet, OpenUSD will spark the era of collaborative 3D and industrial digitalization,” said Huang. “NVIDIA is putting our full force behind the advancement and adoption of OpenUSD through our development of NVIDIA Omniverse and generative AI.”

OpenUSD Goes to the Cloud

NVIDIA announced four new Omniverse Cloud APIs - built for developers to implement and deploy OpenUSD pipelines and applications more seamlessly.

  • ChatUSD — a large language model (LLM) copilot for developers that can answer USD knowledge questions or generate Python-USD code scripts. ChatUSD is fine-tuned using USD functions and Python-USD code snippets from NVIDIA.
  • RunUSD — a cloud API that translates OpenUSD files into fully path-traced rendered images by checking compatibility of the uploaded files against versions of OpenUSD releases and generating renders with Omniverse Cloud. A demo of the API is currently available for developers in the NVIDIA OpenUSD Developer Program.
  • DeepSearch — an LLM agent enabling fast semantic search through massive databases of untagged assets.
  • USD-GDN Publisher — a one-click service that enables enterprises and software makers to publish high-fidelity, OpenUSD-based experiences to the Omniverse Cloud Graphics Delivery Network (GDN) from an Omniverse-based application such as USD Composer, as well as stream in real-time to web browsers and mobile devices.

Evolving OpenUSD Functionality

OpenUSD better connects film and animation pipelines as well as industrial applications — such as building interoperable manufacturing design pipelines, creating physically accurate real-time digital twins of factories, or training and validating autonomous vehicles — require different demands of the 3D framework.

To enable these highly complex industrial and perception AI workloads, NVIDIA is developing NVIDIA Omniverse, the OpenUSD-native software platform for developing applications, as well as technologies that include geospatial data models, metrics assembly, and simulation-ready, or SimReady, specifications for OpenUSD.

Geospatial data models for OpenUSD let users develop simulations and calculations for true-to-reality digital twins of factories, warehouses, cities, and even Earth. It accounts for the planet’s curvature for extreme-scale projects to ensure the simulations are physically accurate.

Industrial applications combine datasets from tools and sources - each represented in different units. NVIDIA is developing a metrics assembly for OpenUSD that enables users to combine diverse datasets accurately.

Also in development is a structure for new SimReady 3D models. These will include true-to-reality material and physical properties critical to accurately training autonomous robots and vehicles. For example, an autonomous robot tasked with sorting packages must be trained in simulation on 3D packages that move and react to physical contact just as they would in the real world.

Early access to OpenUSD services, resources, and tools is available through the NVIDIA OpenUSD Developer Program, including two new fully distributable OpenUSD sample scenes built by NVIDIA designers and artists, Da Vinci’s Workshop and Riverfront Tower.

Source: NVIDIA

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Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.