Pixar Animation Studios has announced that its proprietary Universal Screen Description (USD) software will be going open source by Summer 2016, providing computer animation studios with an incredibly powerful tool to manage scenes in large scale projects.

The techniques used in USD date back to 1998 with Pixar’s film A Bug’s Life. The software allows multiple animators to work on the same scene without creating conflicts, essentially functioning as a collaborative project management tool.

“One of the key aspects of Pixar’s pipeline is the ability for hundreds of artists to operate simultaneously on the same collections of assets in different contexts, using separate ‘layers’ of data that are composited together at various production stages,” Guido Quaroni, VP of Software R&D at Pixar, said in a statement. “USD generalizes these concepts in an attempt to make them available to any DCC application.”

Pixar has already allowed other companies to work with USD, including film and animation studios like MPC Film.

“USD is an amazing opportunity for both software vendors and VFX companies,” said Damien Fagnou, Global Head of VFX Operations for MPC Film. “This type of common open standard drives the industry to greater innovation by focusing development and leveraging a wide community of artists and developers. We have been working with Pixar to evaluate USD since the beginning of the year and plan to use it as a key part of our future VFX pipeline.”

Pixar also allowed software companies like The Foundry, whose Katana software is used in lighting and look development for computer graphics in major motion pictures.

“At The Foundry we believe that USD will have a huge impact, and deserves to become an industry standard similar to OpenEXR and OpenSubdiv,” said Andy Lomas, Product Manager of Katana. “It is an ideal format for creating rich assets that will work naturally with Katana, allowing workflows that were previously only available to large studios using proprietary tools. We consider that it is exactly what is needed to enable a scalable collaborative pipeline, allowing the best in class tools to be used for each part of the production process.”

Image courtesy of Pixar Animation Studios