Lucasfilm has made available a proposal for an open, platform-independent standard for specifying the “look” of CG objects built using shader networks so that these looks or subcomponents of a look can be passed from one software package to another or between different facilities. More on MaterialX’s website.
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“In collaboration with: Autodesk”?
It’s doomed already. Autodesk’s early involvement guarantees that it won’t actually be suitable for its intended purpose.
The way to get a useful standard is to get studios involved, let third parties write the import & export plugins, and THEN let Autodesk know there’s a standard they should support. Otherwise you get bad smells like FBX.
If Autodesk is involved I would stay away. No thanks.
Extraordinary useful. It’s a real missing chain link in look development. There is no common shading format yet between rendering engines. Some efforts like renderman OSL shading language and the new Nvidia’s MDL description language have not been globally adopted yet. If it succeeds we will create a material-shader once and we will use it regardless the rendering engine. It could be something similar to what alembic means for animation today but for look development, lighting and rendering. I hope this will be a quick evolving project and globally implemented across all 3d and compositing applications.