Hi everyone!
Welcome to the AOUSD Forum.
I figured that a good first topic might be to recap and highlight the current USD Proposals open at OpenUSD Proposals. This is also a great time to see what some of the AOUSD founder companies have planned for OpenUSD. We’d love to see proposals from the community appear on there as well. Indeed, we’ve also already had great feedback from community members on there and are excited to see that continue.
The USD Proposals repository is a place where formal proposals for changes to OpenUSD are made, and are open to feedback. While we’re highlighting the proposals here, its still recommended to keep discussion concentrated on the Pull Requests linked below. That just helps make sure that people don’t have to look in two places for the feedback.
Spline Animation
Deneb from Pixar has put up a proposal to add spline animations to USD, also known as animation curves to some.
This would allow the use of spline curves to represent value changes over time, in addition to the current time samples.
Leave comments on the Pull Request or see a rendered version of the proposal.
Multiple Animation Support
To keep with the Animation theme, I have a proposal up with a few different approaches to specifying multiple distinct animation clips for skeletons and general USD hieararchies.
While USD does have variants and value clips, this proposal highlights some of the pros and cons of each approach for use in situations that need to treat the animation as separate data from the hierarchy. For example, this would be useful for loading animations into game engines, crowd simulators or any place where a character may need to switch between different animation states.
Leave comments on the Pull Request or see a rendered version of the proposal.
Stage Variable Expressions
This proposal adds the ability to specify expressions in scene description that will be evaluated by USD at runtime. These expressions will be allowed to refer to “stage variables,” which are entries in a dictionary-valued layer metadata field that (with some limitations) are composed across composition arcs.
Leave comments on the Pull Request or see a rendered version of the proposal.
Self Assembling Model Hierarchy
Matthew Kuruc at NVIDIA has a couple proposals. The first proposal is around the propogation of a models group kind through its child hierarchy, thereby simiplifying model hierarchy construction.
Leave comments on the Pull Request or see the rendered version of the proposal.
PickAPI for picking customization
Matthew’s second proposal enables content authors to customize the picking behavior of their assets for performance or other practical reasons. This proposal outlines a specification for pick visibility and retargeting rules for imageable prims.
Leave comments on the Pull Request or see the rendered version.
Graphics API additions and enhancements
Erika Harrison from Autodesk has three proposals that target either enhancing or adding new graphics backends to Hydra’s HGI interface. Each one is a separate proposal below
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Vulkan
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DirectX12
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WebGPU
That wraps up the current open proposals. Please leave any feedback on the individual proposals themselves. That will simplify the ability for the proposal authors to respond and incorporate the feedback.
Cheers,
Dhruv