Hi Guys
Anybody have any thoughts on these and which you think will prevail in the long run?
So far we have V-Ray support for MDL, not sure about Material X
For those that don’t know what it is:
I am not an expert…but time will tell…for portable material descriptions, USD and J-Cube’s Multiverse approach is also in the play…or maybe something from Chaos Group will prevail… 
Over a year later its in a better shape.
But still not final.
and the Arnold shader whitepaper.
Any “universal” material is a day dream.
Or.. you need to accept the fact that you will use only least common denominator of all renderers.
At least “universal” map tree could be possible with OSL.
Material? Good luck.
Bringing a complex shading network from Max to Houdini or Katana could be helfpfull i would say.
And a basic material that would work everywhere is also nice to have for background stuff.
I agree on the hope.
In my own experience, however, while they all try and do much the same thing, they all get there differently.
In other words, writing in a file that your reflection is of GGX type, white, and with a gloss of 0.8 (or in PBR lingo, roughness of 0.2) ensures no consistency in the results when translated across engines.
Some will have a minimum glossiness, others will have slightly different microfacet masking model, the glossiness amounts won’t be exactly linear, and mean a different thing to each, and so on and so forth.
Heck, even on diffuse models things do not match…
Then we have shading networks, and DCC apps with a set of tools which won’t map (and thank goodness for variety, i say!) exactly, or at all between them.
So, we either agree on a subset of functionalities, the minimum common denominator Changsoo was mentioning, or we expand everyone’s capabilities to match a super standard; but why would someone give away IPs to competitors?
And if they did, and everyone rendered the same images, with the same performance, what would the differentiator be?
That, if those IPs and algorithms even worked within the engines’ different code bases, which they often do not.
These formats will surely allow you to recompose most - feature-mappable - shaders correctly, but the ability to obtain identical results isn’t with the formats, but with the engines which interpret the data to render the image out.
And that part of the road is very long, that i can see.
Then again, i am often wrong.
Best,
Blago.
you read my thoughts. 
I dont see it that way. I dont need the exact same image. I dont expect to get the same result rendering in vray or arnold.
But i dont want to reconnect 500 shader with 30 nodes each time i need to go to an other tool. It not about the shader its about the hole shading graph and textures.
+1000 this
And why would you need MDL or MaterialX to do that?
Any format which you create a reader for can accomplish the simple task, and fail just as equally where there is no feature parity to leverage, no equivalent dictionary entry, forget shading models.
There is nothing radically new in either, it’s all been done before in-house a million times, without neither, for the best part of two decades, with very similar limitations and results.
None of those in-house formats ever claimed to be “universal”, i’ll give you that. ^^
Yes inhouse and thats the issue. We work with a lot of other teams. We need rules to work together. And get scenes and shots from one studio to an other.
I personally don’t think delegating to third parties is either less work, easier work, more comprehensive work, or the resolving kind of work.
I call it sweeping under someone else’s rug.
But of course we all have our opinions on what a pipeline should look like.
You are maybe right. But cause this is an Autodesk project we have this native in maya. If we need data from an other studio its easier than developing our own solution.
FBX became an Autodesk project before, and a lot of good it did to either the format, its capabilities, or its stability.
It’s however still around, entire toolsets have been developed - and sold - around it, and has been marketed as the automagic “maya to max bridge” for many years.
And that never worked beyond the simplest of cases, certainly never as the panacea it was marketed as.
My point is in fact quite simple: it’s still another “language” to learn, to teach people (along with its many specialties, and intricacies, and specific use cases), and then to write and read fluently and effectively.
But, it being essentially wholly third-party, one delegates away the important bits: the changes in lingo, grammar or syntax, one would need for one’s own special case.
If i was still a TD, i’d fight this tooth and nail in the company i was hired in: food is free in jail, and yet i don’t see it as a good reason to spend time there: i’d rather spend time in my own kitchen trying to get better at cooking.
Alas, they are inevitable, as taxes, for as long as the current state of affairs (read: a private entity calling personal standards “universal”, and then making a lot of noise about nothing at all for years.) will continue.
My hope is that at some point the market will unshackle itself from these, but hey it’s a nearly forlorn one.
That all makes a lot of sence. But we here have hundreds of Artists around they dont care about cooking at all.
There will allways be one studio forcing others todo the same.
At the moment behind all this standards like matX or USD is Disney. Others will follow and we have to adopt.
My main question is will we get support from Chaosgroup?
The more artists, the more situations where you’d like to have precise control on what it is you’re doing for and with them.
And the retraining. Madness, particularly if it’s Disney (or anyone else not participating in the effort.) saying so.
You can count on the stuff being supported when it’s mature enough.
Like and dislike (and mine, at that!) have no bearing on Chaos doing what is sensible.
I’m silently watching this debate unfold but… If I’m getting you right, you are referring to Disney here, right?
Not specifically, no: It’s no different to other situations before.
I was personally very miffed at the dropping of the RPF format, in favour of EXR.
Sure, EXR had the advantage of more recent development spent on it (we’re talking early 00s), but to this day, RPF will still manage a better depth comping thanks to richer fragments.
I’d have loved more development went into maturing RPF, instead of spending a decade debugging and improving EXR.
Alas, discreet is no more, AD has no interest in the tech, and everyone (but Photoshop! joke!) reads and writes EXRs correctly by now.
OSL, same thing: why would i listen to Sony, and their arnold-centric pipeline, if i used any other renderer?
Over ten years later, what is the state of the OSL project?
Who spent resources, and loads of them, to mature it?
I think to this day more can be done with GLSL than with OSL.
Is it accidental that the one is put out by a standards consortium, and the other pushed by Sony and the Arnold camp (which ofc now includes AD.)?
Or who recalls the fuss about Disney’s principled material in around 2012? It looked like the cure to all ailments, until someone noticed it didn’t do refraction.
And that the sliders clamps and skews were good as they were for some, specifically the Disney artists with those specific needs, and not for everyone else, much less so in the unique and life-changing way they touted.
USD: Has anyone outside the biggest of studios, which devoted heaps of resources to make it work, seen anything working as advertised with it?
How many years do people have to wait before they realise .vrscene would be able to do much the same tricks, as it has for a decade now, across as many apps as one could think of?
Would it not be great to be able to spend all our dev time on perfecting in-house tech, instead of having to dilute some (you can’t just hire this kind of talent.) devoting it to researching, PoCing and then developing a writer/reader for it?
ABC: sure, xMeshes aren’t free (to write. yet quite cheap.), but man they spanked ABC for performance by an order of magnitude a decade ago.
Fast forward to today, ABC is THE caching format, so ingrained into the daily conversation that it’s now hard to even be able to benchmark it, because of lack of alternatives (well. we do have V-Ray Proxies, of course.).
No one will know if they’re getting sub-par performance without the possibility of a direct measurement, and yet it seems people are just content about delegating responsibility (“ABC is said to work well. We’ll use ABC.”).
We pay the price for the hype these companies put out, hoping as they claim it’ll save us from whatever idiosyncrasy our daily production is afflicted with, missing the slight point that it benefits them (in name, image, shaping of the market, development and debugging of the tech, and so on), more than it benefits us, the single user or little studio.
And i am personally very irked by it.
Thankfully, as i said, no one at ChaosGroup cares about what i think of this stuff, and the users stay pampered with the latest functional tech implemented for them. 
The thing is, sometimes there is no way on this side to fix stuff on the other (ie. issues in the libraries), and guess who gets the grief.
THEY said it works a treat (and even showed a demo or two!), now YOU make it work as it should (i’d refrain here from calling out examples, but there are very many.).
So you see why i don’t much favour this kind of “pushed” development, compared to the slightly gentler flow we’d have on our own: incredibly, we still have plenty of ideas of our own, and still have a record of production-proven, universally so, tech released.
Well, when i say WE, i mean Vlado and co., of course.
I’m turning old very quickly, clearly, and not quite getting the gist of this new CG world we live in.
Don’t take it -let me restate this- as a Chaos’ company line, by any stretch of the imagination: i pictured we were in a Pub, or fishing by a lake, and I thought out loud.