Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1144162
50 cgw s u m m e r 2 0 1 9 In addition to taking advantage of their access to original OpenEXR and Alembic leadership within Lucasfilm (including Flo- rian Kainz and Rob Bredow), the MaterialX team sought out discussions with industry leaders at other companies, to broaden the applicability of the standard and forge connections with other initiatives. In early 2015, the team consulted with Larry Gritz at Sony Pictures Imageworks about using Open Shading Language (OSL) as the reference language for MaterialX nodes, providing a well-defined, open lan - guage to describe their behavior. This idea took root at both studios, and the following year, Gritz brought together a small team of OSL developers (including Adam Martinez and Derek Haase) to write the canonical shading definitions for MaterialX, which were ultimately released as part of its open- source codebase. During the same year, developers at Lucasfilm and Autodesk began discussing their respective goals for material stan - dards, and recognized connections be- tween MaterialX and an Autodesk initiative named Abstract Material Graphs (AMG). The two projects were soon merged, and developers at Lucasfilm and Autodesk began to collaborate on MaterialX as a common standard. This partnership had a profound effect on MaterialX, with Autodesk developers (including Niklas Harrysson and Bernard Kwok) contributing key ideas that would improve its design, as well as features that would be incorporated into the open- source release. THE ROAD MAP AHEAD The original open-source release of MaterialX was developed for Version 1.35 of the MaterialX specification. Lucasfilm later finalized an improved Version 1.36, with publication and code updates prior to SIGGRAPH 2018. In addition, compelling projects at exter- nal companies continue to strongly shape the evolution of MaterialX, as it has over the past year. Autodesk is extending the MaterialX code- base with support for shader code genera- tors and BxDF shader primitives, in addition to integrating MaterialX as a core feature of its tool suite (including Maya and 3ds Max). The addition of shader code generators has enormous potential for MaterialX, opening the door to stand-alone MaterialX viewers that could provide an application-indepen - dent reference for implementations. BxDF shader primitives are a compelling path forward for the renderer-agnostic expression of shading models, potentially eliminating the need for explicit BxDF implementations in each target environment. Pixar is also involved, extending its open-source Unified Scene Description (USD) with a new UsdMatX schema, in order to provide direct support within USD for MaterialX node libraries and documents. This development opens the door to USD geometric hierarchies and MaterialX networks coexisting within a single framework, with composition arcs combining them in flexible ways. Lucas - film and Pixar have closely collaborated to align the two standards for maximum compatibility. Additional details about MaterialX can be found at www.materialx.org, including links to its full specification, open-source codebase on GitHub, and discussion forum on Google Groups. n Jonathan Stone is a senior soware engineer at Lucasfilm Advanced Development Group. Doug Smythe is a CG supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic and co-creator of MaterialX with Jonathan Stone. A SCREEN FROM THE MILLENNIUM FALCON ATTRACTION, FOR WHICH MATERIALX IS A CORE ELEMENT OF ITS TRANSMEDIA ASSET PIPELINE.