The Foundation’s newest hosted project, created by Larry Gritz in 2008, is widely used by VFX and animation studios and integrated into leading production software products; don’t miss the OIIO ‘Birds of a Feather’ session at SIGGRAPH August 7.
The Academy Software Foundation revealed its newest hosted project OpenImageIO (OIIO), a ubiquitous library for VFX applications and pipelines for scripted manipulation of digital image files. The project focuses on scalability and functionality for professional VFX and animation feature film workflows.
Created and open sourced to the community in 2008 by Larry Gritz (Software Architect at Sony Pictures Imageworks), OIIO is one of the VFX industry’s earliest open source projects. It is used extensively by VFX and animation studios worldwide and incorporated into leading commercial products, including SideFX Houdini; Autodesk Maya; Foundry Katana; Blender; Autodesk Arnold; and Isotropix Clarisse. In addition, it is an ecosystem partner of other open source projects using OpenEXR, OpenColorIO, and OpenVDB as dependencies, and in turn, acting as a dependency for Open Shading Language, OpenColorIO, MaterialX, USD, and Gaffer.
“The Academy Software Foundation is proud to be hosting OpenImageIO as a project,” Academy Software Foundation executive director David Morin. “OpenImageIO has been one of the hallmark open source projects of the motion picture industry, and becoming part of the Foundation will invigorate it with new contributors and ideas moving forward.”
OIIO provides a format-agnostic API for production software for reading and writing image data across any file format and implementation encountered in motion pictures, such as TIFF, OpenEXR, DPX, Cineon, JPEG, and DSLR raw formats. On top of this functionality are library classes for manipulating entire images and performing a wide variety of image processing and conversion operations.
Use cases for OIIO range from simple conversions (e.g., converting an OpenEXR file to a reduced-resolution JPEG thumbnail) to handling all image input, output, and texturing for leading 3D rendering systems and other complex applications. Its Python bindings and the command line ‘oiiotool’ utility are commonly used by VFX and animation studios as a daily workhorse for file format conversions, resizing and format conformance for ingest and delivery, color conversion, and image processing.
“As OpenImageIO has become indispensable to the film industry, it’s time to widen the pool of contributors, steering, and resources so that we can go above and beyond its current levels of development to explore interesting avenues such as improved Windows support, GPU porting and acceleration, Rust and C bindings, and machine learning integrations,” stated Gritz. “We are ready for big, bold new ideas, and joining the Academy Software Foundation will ensure that the brightest engineering minds from across the industry are working together to make OpenImageIO even more robust and reliable for years to come.”
Gritz will also host a session on OpenImageIO on August 1 as part of the Academy Software Foundation’s Virtual Town Hall Series, leading up to the annual Open Source Days event on August 6. In addition, the Academy Software Foundation is also hosting a Birds of a Feather session for OpenImageIO on Monday August 7 at SIGGRAPH; details and registration are available here.
Companies interested in supporting the Academy Software Foundation mission can get additional information here.
Source: Academy Software Foundation
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
