Pipeline Standards

Interchange formats and standards.

• ACES 2.0. Academy Color Encoding System. Widely adopted in film/TV, growing in games.
• Alembic. Geometry/animation interchange format (Sony + ILM).
• MaterialX (GitHub). Source repo for the MaterialX material and look-dev interchange standard.
• MaterialX (site). Material interchange format (Lucasfilm). Supported by USD, Blender, Maya, Houdini, Arnold, RenderMan, Substance.
• MDL. Material Definition Language SDK (NVIDIA).
• Open Color IO. Color management solution for motion picture production. Open source.
• Open Image IO. A library for reading and writing images in many common and VFX-related formats.
• OpenCue. Render management system from Sony Imageworks. Open source.
• OpenDCX. C++ extensions for OpenEXR's "deep" file format (DreamWorks).
• OpenEXR. High dynamic range image format for visual effects, from ILM.
• OpenPBR. Standardized uber-shader for PBR (Autodesk + Adobe).
• OpenTimelineIO (GitHub). Editorial timeline interchange (Pixar).
• VFX Reference Platform. Annual spec of library versions (Python, Qt, OpenEXR, USD) that VFX apps build against for cross-tool compatibility.