The organization’s Open Source Days event for open source software for the visual effects, animation, and digital content creation industries takes place August 6 in Los Angeles, in-person and virtually.
The Academy Software Foundation has announced three new members: Bolt Graphics, CoreWeave, and OTOY. The companies each offer complementary solutions to accelerate content creation in visual effects and other creative content workflows.
The news comes ahead of the Foundation’s annual Open Source Days, an event dedicated to open source software for the visual effects, animation, and digital content creation industries, taking place in-person and virtually August 6 in Los Angeles. This year’s event will see the addition of the Virtual Town Hall Series leading up to the Main Program. Projects including MaterialX; OpenColorIO; OpenAssetIO; Open RV; xStudio; OpenTimelineIO; and OpenEXR, among others, will share milestones, highlights, future roadmaps, and answer questions from the community. Academy Software Foundation offers the main program and the virtual town halls for free to anyone interested in attending.
Founded in 2020, Bolt Graphics provides a hardware-accelerated ray tracing solution, enabling users to work with higher fidelity previs, dailies, and faster final renders. Bolt has also recently expanded its product portfolio to solve rendering performance challenges for architecture and design, virtual production, product design, and immersive experiences. Already leveraging Academy Software Foundation projects including MaterialX, OpenEXR, and OpenVDB, Bolt looks forward to taking a more direct role in the continued development of each.
CoreWeave, a specialized GPU cloud provider, builds fast, cost-efficient cloud solutions for compute-intensive applications, including VFX and rendering, machine learning and artificial intelligence, batch processing, and pixel streaming. Founded in 2017, CoreWeave’s offerings also include Conductor, a secure cloud-based service that enables VFX, VR/AR, architecture visualization, and animation studios to seamlessly offload rendering and simulation workloads to the public cloud. CoreWeave looks forward to involvement with projects including OpenCue, OpenEXR, OpenColorIO, OpenAssetIO, Rez, and MaterialX.
OTOY Inc., a leader in GPU cloud graphics, boasts Academy Award-winning technology used by visual effects studios, artists, animators, designers, architects, and engineers to achieve unprecedented levels of photorealism and creative flexibility. Its pioneering technology provides an end-to-end platform for next generation media production, distribution, and monetization - led by the Render Network, the industry’s first decentralized GPU computing ecosystem for cutting edge holographic media and advanced machine learning applications.
“We’re excited to celebrate our fifth anniversary and the continued growth of the Foundation by welcoming these three new members,” shared David Morin, Executive Director of the Academy Software Foundation. “These innovative companies are leading the way in the creation of new rendering and cloud-based workflows, and they have already engaged with several of our open source projects. We look forward to seeing what they bring to the Foundation.”
Darwesh Singh, Founder & CEO of Bolt Graphics stated, “Open source is critical to our development effort, as it provides our customers and users the ability to easily bring their work to our platform without undergoing a complicated porting or conversation effort. We have been longtime users of MaterialX, OpenEXR, and OpenVDB, and with membership in the Foundation we’re excited to step up our contributions to these crucial projects.”
“Our aim has always been to simplify and streamline access to cloud-based resources for our customers, and a key part of that is supporting their preferred standards and formats, which are increasingly open source,” said Mac Moore, CoreWeave Head of M&E. “The Academy Software Foundation is guiding the development of many of those important standards and initiatives, and we need to understand where they’re headed to better serve the community. By joining the Foundation, we’re able to gain that insight and also contribute to areas where we have expertise – cloud-first approaches and orchestration.”
Jules Urbach, CEO of OTOY said, “Open source allows for the most effective collaboration within our industry to give artists the best tools to express themselves. This is important to us as several open source projects such as OpenColorIO, MaterialX, and Open Shading Language are part of the ITMF specification. We look forward to participating in these projects and helping to steer their ongoing development.”
To learn about more about Academy Software Foundation membership, visit https://www.aswf.io/join/
Source: Academy Software Foundation
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
