Think Daz'll go along with this?

Tafi/Daz has already mentioned OpenUSD support in Daz Studio 5:

Tafi currently allows users to output high-quality characters from Daz Studio into popular game engines and 3D software applications in native formats, including Unreal, Unity, Blender, Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya and Maxon Cinema 4D, and its next update will include NVIDIA’s Omniverse via support for Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD)OpenUSD.

@ethiopia, you're reading it backwards. They're saying that DS5 will be able to export to OpenUSD format (which happens to be what Omniverse requires). They're not saying you need Omniverse at all. They're saying, "hey, if you're interested in playing with this cool new Omniverse thing, good news--DS5 will be able to write USD format, so you're golden!"

The whole point of USD (and hence OpenUSD) is to let 3D apps of all kinds use a common import/export format. It has nothing to do with Omniverse specifically. 3DS Max, C4D, Blender, Maya, Unity, Unreal Engine, etc.--all either already support USD or plan to in upcoming versions, so being able to exchange 3D content between apps without losing a lot of important metadata (e.g. as we currently experience with lowest-common-denominator resorts like OBJ, FBX, etc.) is what OpenUSD is about, and why it's in the industry's interest as a whole to support it. Hence Tafi offering us that little hint about it in their press release for an unrelated feature.

Daz will go along with it because it means their assets get purchased more if they can be easily exported to other 3d engines.

At the end of the day, Studio is just a tool used to sell more assets. Any tools that they can implement into studio to get more assets sold will absolutely be exploited.

@pooper, not exactly. Those formats were proposed by individual companies without consultation with others. Each one of those vendors thought that their new and improved format would render all competing formats obsolete through sheer market dominance. There was no attempt to negotiate any industry-wide standard, just a competition to be the company that invents a format so superior that everyone either switches to their product, or other vendors are forced (by customer demand) to include support for that format. They all dreamt of being the ones to hit on the "PDF" of 3D, in other words.

Lightwave had OBJ and Autodesk built on that to make FBX, figuring everyone would switch to their new standard because it did everything that OBJ did and more, but of course Lightwave did not want to lose customers to Autodesk, so they added more extensions to OBJ and deliberately did not add FBX support to their products, so rather than ending up with a universal format this competition to develop the "dominant" format only encouraged companies to make their products less compatible.

That's what's different with OpenUSB. It's a recognition (at long last) that there needs to be industry-wide standardization, and a standards group with representatives from all the major vendors working out what that should look like, in much the same way that we have standards groups for technologies like WiFi, TCP/IP, etc.