CGW has officially announced Autodesk and Adobe's OpenPBR source shading model as a recipient of a CGW Silver Edge Award for SIGGRAPH 2023. Selected by CGW's editorial team, the Silver Edge Awards recognize the most innovative and impressive technologies announced or on display at the annual conference.
Out of the many exhibitors participating in SIGGRAPH’s 50th annual conference this year, CGW selected 10 companies for their outstanding technological achievements. These best-of-show selections demonstrate remarkable advancements in the field of computer graphics.
About Autodesk & Adobe’s OpenPBR Source Shading Model
Autodesk and Adobe recently announced their collaboration on a new source shading model called OpenPBR (Open Physically-Based Rendering), a new subproject of MaterialX, that will be a successor to Autodesk Standard Surface and the Adobe Standard Material. This new open-source specification is under the governance of the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF).
MaterialX, an open standard for representing rich material and look-development content in computer graphics, enables platform-independent description and exchange across applications and renderers. First launched at Industrial Light & Magic in 2012, MaterialX provides an open standard to represent the data values and relationships required to describe the look of a computer graphics model. This includes shading networks, patterns and texturing, complex nested materials, and geometric assignments.
OpenPBR builds upon MaterialX by providing a description of how an artist will interface with the physical properties of the surface they’re creating, giving artists a more specific interface to work within, and the ability to transfer data back and forth between assets with very little conversion needed.
To make their vision for a cloud-driven future a reality, Autodesk is also partnering with industry leaders to enable greater interoperability between 3D tools and data. They recently joined Pixar, Adobe, Apple, and NVIDIA as inaugural members of the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), launched by the Joint Development Foundation, an affiliate of The Linux Foundation.
Autodesk has stated that they are proud to be part of an industry-wide effort to make it easier for artists to collaborate more effectively across projects, tools, and teams.