The recently completed MPEG-I Scene Description ISO/IEC 23090 standard builds on glTF 2.0 using the MPEG vendor extension framework. The need for a flexible and dynamic scene description solution for immersive experiences had been identified early in the process of specifying technologies for immersive media in MPEG. In looking for a solution to this gap, MPEG reviewed existing technologies to identify formats with a history of being successfully deployed and widely used. The group then evaluated whether one of these formats would satisfy the identified requirements, or whether a new format needs to be defined from scratch. glTF stood out as an exemplary option.
In a glTF meet-up presentation, Khronos members shared the use cases and requirements that lead to choosing glTF, and detailed the architecture of the extensions. This blog summarizes that presentation, explaining the journey to incorporating glTF 2.0 into MPEG-I scene description and how content creators and developers can begin using this new standard to develop interactive real-time applications.
In a collaborative effort between Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) members Pixar, Autodesk, and Adobe, we are excited to announce experimental support for the Vulkan API through the HgiVulkan backend, available in OpenUSD 24.08. OpenUSD is a high-performance, extensible software platform for collaboratively creating, editing, and simulating complex 3D scenes.This allows developers to start leveraging Vulkan in Storm or other Hgi-based renderers.
ANARI is the industry’s open standard, cross-platform 3D rendering engine API developed by the Khronos Group to provide portable access to sophisticated 3D functionality including ray tracing and global illumination. ANARI is already widely used by scientific visualization applications and is implemented over multiple rendering engines, including AMD’s RadeonProRender, Intel’s OSPRay, and NVIDIA’s VisRTX, among others. ANARI is developed with full public access to the specification and has recently incorporated significant community feedback, including improvements to the object interface, better error handling through guaranteed API stream robustness, revamped runtime feature queries, directly mapped array parameters, improved volume shading, and compatibility with the Khronos glTF Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) materials.
Ultra Engine 0.9.6 introduces a new foliage system using GLSL compute shaders for efficient rendering of dense forests. The engine makes extensive use of Khronos’ glTF file format and PBR rendering reference code. Ultra Engine leverages Khronos technologies to provide up to 10x faster framerates for games and VR applications. Find out about other features included in the latest Ultra Engine release.
In this Rastergrid article, they write about the secret sauce behind the Vulkan SC Ecosystem components that enabled them to leverage the industry-proven Vulkan Ecosystem components to provide corresponding developer tooling for the safety-critical variant of the Vulkan API.
After Effects 24.5 continues Adobe’s ongoing overhaul of the software’s 3D toolset. Changes include the option to import 3D models with embedded animations, originally rolled out in beta in April, and now available in the stable release. Animation support is currently restricted to files in glTF/GLB format.
