Open Source Days 2026

Industry standards like MaterialX, USD, and OpenPBR are key to enabling collaboration between individual artists and across production pipelines that use different DCC applications. OpenPBR is a unified shading model that allows artists to design and share assets between different applications while preserving their appearance.
In this talk, we will present insights into Blender’s journey toward adopting OpenPBR support. We will discuss the challenges we faced during our integration, including discrepancies between our OSL backend, which used code generated by MaterialX’s OSL code generator, and our strictly spec-based implementation in Cycles’ own SVM shading system.
To analyze these discrepancies, we collaborated with the OpenPBR team and began developing a testing framework to compare the appearance of different OpenPBR material setups across renderers (e.g., Cycles, Arnold, or Adobe's OpenPBR library). The framework will improve consistency in the future, when using OpenPBR.