Open Source Days 2026

Lens metadata should connect what happened on set to what happens in post, but in many productions it is incomplete, mistrusted or lost before it reaches VFX. In this 10-minute lightning talk, Gary Keller, General Manager of DCS, will introduce an industry survey designed to measure where lens metadata breaks down, how often it affects matchmove, layout, compositing and virtual production workflows, and what developers need from camera, lens, metadata and pipeline vendors. The talk will explain why DCS is running the survey, how the anonymised findings will be shared openly, and how the data can support better open-source tooling, interoperability and standards discussions. Attendees will leave with a clearer view of the problem, an invitation to contribute, and a practical dataset they can use to inform future pipeline work.

Unreal Engine 5.8 introduces the new Tiled Mipmap Video format, which delivers high-performance in-engine video playback with tiled streaming, smooth scrubbing, HDR support, and efficient compression, reducing the storage and bandwidth demands of high-resolution EXR workflows for ICVFX and live event production.

TMV is an extension to the OpenAPV codec and this talk details Epic Games' work to design and build the feature as well as its collaboration with the Academy Software Foundation to contribute it to the open source community.

his session explores the growing convergence of OpenUSD, MaterialX, and OpenPBR as a unified open-source rendering pipeline for VFX and animation production. Speaker presents the latest developments in how MaterialX shader networks and OpenPBR material definitions are being authored, exchanged, and rendered within USD-based pipelines. The session covers practical integration patterns, interoperability challenges solved in recent open-source releases, and a demonstration of an open-source reference renderer that exercises the full USD + MaterialX + OpenPBR stack. Attendees will leave with a concrete understanding of the current state of physically based shading in open-source pipelines and actionable guidance for adopting these standards in their own studio workflows.

In this presentation we will talk about the cross Lucasfilm/Pixar collaboration to bring arbitrary MaterialX BSDF networks to RenderMan XPU. We'll highlight the approach we took to allow the same source code to run seamlessly on CPU and GPUs -- opening the door to MaterialX Standard Surface and OpenPBR. We will use a new asset we will make available to the community as the basis for our talk.

In order to achieve the dream of reliable, consistent results in lighting and materials across OpenUSD applications, we need a reference implementation and compliance test suite for the various emerging standards across such projects as UsdLux and MaterialX for developers and users to refer to.

This talk describes an open-source, cross-platform, reference path tracer implemented as an extension to the OpenUSD hdEmbree delegate. Developed by engineers at NVIDIA, this path tracer builds on the rich ecosystem of open-source foundations such as MaterialX and OpenQMC to provide a framework for the community to share knowledge and development of rendering standards that will enable seamless rendering interoperability.

BowerBot started as a way to import assets from different
sources like Sketchfab and place them into OpenUSD scenes
organized the way production pipelines expect, so artists
could focus on refining layout composition instead of fixing
layer structure. The project has since grown into an Apache
2.0 open-source AI agent that authors full OpenUSD scenes
from natural language while following guidelines from the
Academy Software Foundation, Pixar, NVIDIA, and the Alliance
for OpenUSD. Unlike AI tools that generate Python code on the
fly, BowerBot uses a tool-based architecture. The agent calls
a fixed set of pre-built tools that wrap the pxr Python
bindings, with ASWF guidelines enforced inside the tool
implementations.
BowerBot's plugin system lets studios connect
their own asset managers and pipeline tools as skills. The
session covers the architecture, the patterns it enforces,
and why tool-based agents produce more reliable USD than
code-generating alternatives.