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by elif 1054 days ago
USD will be great for animators, but I think the biggest beneficiaries will be AI's. The question of how and at what layers AI could interact with 3D art and still give the final aesthetic decision to humans with a true artistic eye left a big gap in willingness to use AI for 3D projects.

If, essentially, they are speaking the same language as humans, this curation becomes trivial and the cost of incorporating AI becomes purely artistic in nature rather than a technical or organizational cost. There will be no downside for a 3D artist to tell the servers "render this scene, but generate a few different versions if you finish before I get back to work tomorrow" in the worst scenario it is electricity used, in the average scenario it can inspire new ideas, and in the ideal scenario it creates something usable.
5 comments
flohofwoe 1054 days ago
> but I think the biggest beneficiaries will be AI's

It's just another 3D file format, calm down ;)

There have been quite a few "standard" 3D file formats in the last 30 years (COLLADA, FBX, glTF, to name a few of the more popular ones, check here for a more complete list: https://github.com/assimp/assimp/tree/master/code/AssetLib), USD isn't anything special except that Apple is involved (which means you probably shouldn't put too much hope into the "Open" prefix, or at least expect that Apple jumps ship as soon as the first cracks start to show in the "alliance").

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janosdebugs 1053 days ago
I don't think we'll have 3D AI art anytime soon. Most if not all AI for 2D works on a pixel basis. 3D is more like SVG, except there is a whole third dimension to contend with. There are AIs that manage to produce SVGs, but I have yet to see a clean one where the objects are actually properly grouped and not just a bunch of random shapes thrown together to do a vector approximation of pixels.

If anyone finds an AI that can do reasonable SVGs, please do let me know.

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rallyforthesun 1054 days ago
nvidia uses usd as standardfileformat in its omniverse 3d suite. They are starting to integrate AI into it, for example to convert an image into a 3d scene.
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ferrumfist 1053 days ago
It's a standardized file that describes a 3D scene (with references to assets, transforms, etc). It makes asset pipelines easier to spin up and iterate on, but I don't think anything about USD specifically will further enable AI art projects more than they actually do.
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rcarr 1054 days ago
This was my immediate thought. I reckon this will be one of the early steps in getting to automated movies.
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