The French film industry association, the CST (Higher Technical Commission for Sound and Image), has released 3D-Info, a lightweight open source viewer for USD files.
The tool is intended to provide non-technical artists with an easy way to view scenes in Universal Scene Description format without having to open a DCC application.
A key technology in VFX, animation, virtual production and game development
Developed internally at Pixar and released as open source in 2016, Universal Scene Description has become a central part of the VFX, animation and game development pipelines.
The USD file format, which enables the exchange of high-level scene data between software tools, is now supported by almost every major DCC application.
An intuitive alternative to UsdView for viewing and editing USD scenes
Although the USD framework comes with its own native viewer, UsdView, 3D-Info is intended to provide an intuitive – and ultimately more feature-rich – alternative.
In an interview with 3dvf.com, project owner Frédéric Fermon describes the inspiration for 3D-Info as the open source video tag and metadata viewer MediaInfo.
“The idea came when I was looking for a way to fully understand the 3D assets available to me without having to open a DCC (application),” he said.
“I remembered (MediaInfo), which my colleagues regularly use in mastering, and I wanted a similar tool for 3D.”
Currently a simple scene viewer, but will become an application with more comprehensive features
The current beta, 3D-Info 0.2.25, focuses mainly on the display and navigation of USD scenes: According to Fermon, it should render scenes visually identical to UsdView.
However, the ultimate goal of the CST is to make 3D Info a more professional tool with more comprehensive features: features listed in the project roadmap include adjusting lighting, shading and cameras, playing animations, and inspecting scene data and object hierarchy.
The developers also plan to add asset review and collaboration features, including the ability to add comments and send them to collaborators.
The roadmap is led by CST’s partner studios, animation company Loops Creative Studio and film and virtual production facility Plateau Virtuel, who are using USD in production.
License and system requirements
3D-Info 0.2.25 is available as an executable file for Ubuntu 20.04 Linux. The software is in beta phase.
The source code is available under an Apache 2.0 license and can also be compiled on Windows: instructions can be found on GitLab.
Read more about 3D-Info on the project’s Trello roadmap
Download the free USD Viewer 3D-Info from the project’s GitLab repository
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