Pixar is making another in-house animation tool free for anyone to use

Pixar Animation Studios, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, is an Academy Award®-winning film studio with world-renowned technical, creative and production capabilities in the art of computer animation.  The Northern California studio has created some of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time, including "Toy Story," "Monsters, Inc.," “Cars,” "The Incredibles," "Ratatouille," "WALL•E," "Up," "Toy Story 3” and “Brave.” Its movies have won 30 Academy Awards® and have grossed more than $8.7 billion at the worldwide box office to date. “Inside Out,” Pixar’s fifteenth feature, is currently in theaters worldwide.

Last year, Pixar made its in-house animation software RenderMan free for non-commercial use, giving would-be filmmakers a powerful tool to get started with animated shorts and films. Now, it's following this up by making another piece of in-house software not only free, but also open source. Pixar's Universal Scene Description tool (USD) acts as an assembly station for input from various animation apps, making it easier to combine characters and objects into a single "scene graph" — a basic layer of the animation — for smoother workflow. Unlike with Renderman, though, Pixar doesn't want to empower just amateur filmmakers, but also create an industry standard that it hopes will drive innovation. The company is preparing the open-source project for a summer 2016 launch