Jonathan Stone

ASWF #DevDays is next week! Join developers from around the world on Sept. 25 by picking a task from an #ASWF project, including that can be completed in one day. All levels of experience are welcome! Find out more and sign up to participate at www.aswf.io/dev-days.

@materialx.bsky.social

A real-time render of the hex-tiled onyx example from the MaterialX project.

MaterialX v1.39.4 has been released!

This version adds support for WebGPU Shading Language, hex-tiled and lat-long images, NanoColor spaces, 2D fractals, animated materials, and many contributions from our participants in ASWF Dev Days 2025.

github.com/AcademySoftw...

Our next virtual #DevDays is coming up Sept. 25! Spend a day contributing to one of the #ASWF projects and supporting the software our industry relies on. Find out more and sign up at www.aswf.io/dev-days/!

YouTube video by Academy Software Foundation MaterialX Virtual Town Hall 2025

For interested folks who couldn't attend the event, the video for our recent MaterialX and OpenPBR Virtual Town Hall is now posted:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTSR...

Most of the slides and course notes for the SIGGRAPH 2025 Physically Based Shading in Theory and practice course are now online, with more to follow:
blog.selfshadow.com/publications...

The MaterialX Chess Set in OctaneRender 2026.1.

The MaterialX Lama Stirling with MaterialX BSDF layers in RenderMan XPU.

Thanks to our colleagues at Autodesk, IKEA, NVIDIA, OTOY, and Pixar Animation Studios for their amazing work on the MaterialX and OpenPBR Virtual Town Hall for @aswf.io Open Source Days 2025.

The full slide deck can be found at materialx.org/assets/ASWF_...

Announcing OpenPBR Volume! - ASWF OpenPBR Volume is a new collaboration between Autodesk and SideFX to create a common model for defining the look of volumetric assets.

We're excited to share #OpenPBR Volume, a new collaboration between Autodesk and Sidefx to create an open standard enabling users to define the look of volumetric assets. OpenPBR is a subproject of @materialx.bsky.social. Read more: www.aswf.io/blog/openpbr...

MaterialX cloth material in the Standard Surface shading model.

MaterialX cloth material in the glTF PBR shading model.

Highlighting one talk at this event, Johan Bowald from IKEA will present new work on Shader Translation Graphs in content production.

The two renders below are of a MaterialX cloth material, with the original Standard Surface on the left, and the glTF PBR translation on the right.

Anisotropic perlin noise on Suzanne

New at #SIGGRAPH2025:

Can we make Perlin Noise stretch along some underlying vector field? Well it turns out it's possible with two simple additions to the original method! No need for advection or convolutions.

Find the paper and implementations here:
github.com/jakericedesi...

The MaterialX Chess Set in OctaneRender 2026.1.

The MaterialX Lama Stirling with MaterialX BSDF layers in RenderMan XPU.

Join us on August 5th for the MaterialX Virtual Townhall at ASWF Open Source Days 2025, featuring presentations from Autodesk, IKEA, Lucasfilm, NVIDIA, OpenPBR, OTOY, and Pixar.

events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-...

#LAIKA Joins the #AcademySoftwareFoundation - award-winning #animation studio and longtime contributor to the MaterialX project, and #OpenUSD Working Group plans to help expand the organization’s mission and learning programs. bit.ly/40Iu6NN #Stopmotion #3Dprinting #AnimationWorld #VFXWorld

We've just marked the first release candidate for MaterialX v1.39.4 on GitHub, and we'd love to get feedback from teams with MaterialX and USD integrations.

The tag for the release candidate is v1.39.4-rc1, and you can read more about the new features and updates at github.com/AcademySoftw...

Virtual Townhalls | LF Events Leading up to our main program on August 10, we will be holding a series of virtual town halls for Academy Software Foundation projects including MaterialX, OpenCue, OpenColorIO, Open RV, among others...

Join us on August 5th for the MaterialX and OpenPBR Virtual Townhall at ASWF Open Source Days 2025, featuring presentations from Autodesk, IKEA, Lucasfilm, NVIDIA, OTOY, and Pixar RenderMan.

events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-...

Open Source Days 2025 Keynote to be Delivered by Academy Award®-winning ‘Flow’ Filmmaking Team - ASWF The Academy Software Foundation has announced the program for its annual Open Source Days event taking place August 4-11, which will include a keynote talk by the filmmaking team who worked on the ani...

We're excited to announce that our keynote for Open Source Days 2025 will be delivered by the Academy Award®-winning ‘Flow’ filmmaking team! Join us for free on August 10 (in-person or virtually) for that and much more! Full schedule and registration details on our blog: www.aswf.io/news/open-so...

YouTube video by High-Performance Graphics HPG 2025: Day 2 - June 24th

Congratulations to Alain Hostettler on a great talk at HPG 2025, including the announcement of a Pixar/Lucasfilm collaboration on the MaterialX Physically Based Shading nodes in RenderMan XPU!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=md6S...

High-Performance Graphics 2025 High-Performance Graphics 2025 - June 23-25 Copenhagen

The HPG 2025 Conference starts tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to the MaterialX talk from my ILM colleague Alain Hostettler, the RenderMan XPU talk from Pixar, and the Slang talk from @shannonin3d.bsky.social.

highperformancegraphics.org/2025/program...

The SIGGRAPH Physically Based Shading course is back this year: blog.selfshadow.com/publications...

YouTube video by Metaverse Standards Forum Material Convergence - Material, glTF, and USD

This was a really fun conversation on MaterialX, glTF, and OpenUSD at the Metaverse Standards Forum last week, and I thought I'd share it here for interested folks.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-bE...

One update we want to celebrate in USD 25.05 is having MaterialX v1.39.3 -- which includes OpenPBR Surface and the Chiang Hair BSDF -- as the new default MatX version. 🎉

Thank you for the close collab @materialx.bsky.social! 💖 We're excited to see the cool things folks create with this combo!

Join the 3D Asset Interoperability Working Group on April 30th for the education session, Material Convergence - MaterialX, glTF, and USD with Jonathan Stone and Ed Mackey. All members are welcome! Not a member? Join us - metaverse-standards.org/members/
#glTF #MaterialX #USD

Happy twentieth to the Psychonauts crew, an amazing game team that I remain deeply proud to have worked alongside. Thanks to @timoflegend.bsky.social, @erikrobson.net, @doubleanna.bsky.social, @keescheese.bsky.social, @scottlava.bsky.social, and the rest of this brilliant band of troublemakers.

Are you interested in contributing to an #ASWF project but don't know where to start? Join us on May 15 for #DevDays and spend one day learning about a project, benefiting from the mentorship of project leaders, and of course writing code! Register at devdays.aswf.io.

Open Source Days | LF Events Open Source Days, by the Academy Software Foundation, is the leading event for open source in VFX, animation, and digital content creation.

The call for presentations for #ASWF Open Source Days is now open until May 18! We are expecting a full house again this year with 250+ software engineers from across the motion picture industry. Submit your talk at aswf.io/opensourcedays

Lambert model (left), the classic “qualitative” Oren–Nayar QON model (center), and our new EON model (right), all at maximal roughness and the same single-scattering albedo color. The top and bottom rows show front and side-lit cases respectively. The EON model compensates for the energy loss of the QON model, producing similar brightness to the Lambert model combined with the characteristic “flattening” and enhanced backscattering of the Oren–Nayar model.

EON: A practical energy-preserving rough diffuse BRDF; by Portsmouth, Kutz, and Hill. www.jcgt.org/published/00...

Implemented USD point instancer primvar support in my toy renderer the last few days. Can now render this 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) scene with a single mesh & MaterialX material.

(Created by Oliver Markowski with Houdini, link see below ⬇️)

This Year’s Hollywood Awards Season was Powered by Open Source - ASWF Open source software contributed to the making of award winning films like Flow, Dune: Part Two, The Wild Robot, Inside Out 2 and Moana 2.

Did you know that many of the Academy Award winners and nominees used open source software? Learn more about some of the open source tools used on films like Flow and The Wild Robot at www.aswf.io/blog/this-ye... #ASWF #opensource #VFX #animation

Assuming this collaboration achieves its goal, it should make modern shading features such as OpenPBR Surface, energy-preserving Oren-Nayar Diffuse, and the Chiang Hair BSDF available in all future versions of OpenUSD, which would be a major benefit to artists working in this ecosystem.

Although it’s a small set of updates, I’m particularly proud of this latest release because it resulted from a collaboration between the @openusd.bsky.social and @materialx.bsky.social projects, with the goal of making MaterialX v1.39.3 the new default in USD 25.05.