The Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) has kicked off a “Meet the Visionary” editorial series, spotlighting key players within the Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) community. The first featured person in this series is, befittingly, Steve May, CTO of Pixar Animation Studios and chair of AOUSD.
USD has come a long way since its early beginnings at Pixar. What began as an experiment in 2012 at the studio led to the digital magic on screen that followed, starting with Finding Dory, the first feature-length film that used a USD-based pipeline. It didn’t take long before the technology blossomed into robust software for describing, composing, interchanging, and interacting with extremely complex 3D scenes. At Siggraph 2016, USD had its coming-out party and went public when Pixar made it available on GitHub. It soon reached adoption within the VFX industry, and more recently, it became an important component of 3D content creation outside the entertainment industry.
AOUSD was formed last summer to advance OpenUSD as its adoption becomes even more widespread across various industries.
AOUSD’s inaugural series featuring May can be found on the alliance’s website.