Pixar demonstrates Hydra, an open source direct 3D visualization. Hydra is the high-scalability, multi-pass, OpenSubdiv-based rendering architecture that ships as part of the USD distribution. Its first and primary “back end” is a modern deferred-draw OpenGL implementation with support for pre-packaged and programmable glsl shaders, but it is intended to support multiple back-ends, just as it already supports multiple front-end clients simultaneously, and Pixar has already prototyped an Optix-based backend for path-tracing.




