[Bf-usd] Collaboration goals

[Michael A Kowalski]

Hi Brian,
Thank you very much for your comments.  Our position is that we would be happy to support and help with the MaterialX integration effort in Blender as well.

To clarify, MDL isn’t a vendor specific format.  It’s BSD-licensed open source and is currently supported in more tools than any other material interchange.  Tools that support MDL include Substance Designer, V-Ray, Solidworks Visualize, Unreal Engine, Siemens NX and Quixel Megascans.

That said, we want to emphasize that MDL and MaterialX complement each other.  As you point out, there is a MaterialX backend for MDL, as described in this March GTC talk:

https://resources.nvidia.com/gtcd-2020/GTC2020-s21469?lx=3X9y6T

Also, MDL support is now part of the regular Lucasfilm git repository of MaterialX (https://github.com/materialx/MaterialX/tree/v1.38).

Thanks,
Michael


From: Bf-usd <bf-usd-bounces at blender.org> On Behalf Of Brian Savery
Sent: Friday, September 11, 2020 9:08 AM
To: bf-usd at blender.org
Subject: Re: [Bf-usd] Collaboration goals

External email: Use caution opening links or attachments





NVIDIA is fully committed to adopting and supporting USD as an open interchange format, and our hope is to help make Blender a first-class member of the USD ecosystem.  To that end, our initial goals are to



  *   Help complete the USD importer/exporter implementation

  *   Add support for USD/MDL materials in order to permit easy materials exchange with other DCC tools



Michael. Glad to see Nvidia contributing to this. However, I disagree with adding support for "open interchange" with Mdl materials, since that is a vendor specific format. Wouldn't it make more sense to focus on materialx (which you guys have a Mdl back end for anyway). We (AMD) are starting this effort now with materialx and would welcome the contribution.

Not trying to call out anything but let's not add more vendor specific stuff to "open Software".

Brian
--
brian.savery at gmail.com<mailto:brian.savery at gmail.com>
508-274-8700
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