Recently, Trimble has joined the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), an industry group focused on strengthening interoperability between platforms and software applications across industries. USD (universal scene description) is a file format created by Pixar and championed by Apple that has become critically adopted by NVIDIA with its Omniverse technologies.
OpenUSD is an industry movement to gain widespread adoption and support of the USD format across software systems and industries, and the new Alliance for OpenUSD is a recent development to further formalize those efforts.
SketchUp and USD
As part of the alliance, Trimble’s SketchUp has created a new USDZ* exporter that gives designers a smoother pathway from SketchUp to NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud for advanced visualizations.
OshKosh, WI, modeled in SketchUp and rendered in NVIDIA Omniverse by Houseal Lavigne. (Image: Trimble / Houseal Lavigne)
This technology addition has had a huge impact on the designers at Houseal Lavigne, who have, for the very first time, visualized an entire city model in SketchUp within Omniverse. The team fully modeled the City of OshKosh, Wisconsin, in SketchUp. Then, the team used the USDZ* exporter to send the file data into Omniverse, where they could develop a hyper-realistic city model.
Adding foliage and animations like cars driving around the city, OshKosh was brought to life. To learn more visit here.