The Academy Software Foundation is pleased to welcome three new members: Bolt Graphics, CoreWeave, and OTOY. The companies each offer complementary solutions to accelerate content creation in visual effects workflows and beyond.
This news comes ahead of the Foundation’s annual Open Source Days event, taking place in-person and virtually on August 6 in Los Angeles. Open Source Days is the leading event dedicated to open source software for the visual effects, animation, and digital content creation industries. New this year is the addition of the Virtual Town Hall Series leading up to the Main Program on August 6. Academy Software Foundation projects including MaterialX, OpenColorIO, OpenAssetIO, Open RV, xStudio, OpenTimelineIO, and OpenEXR, among others, will share milestones, highlights, future roadmaps, and answer questions from the community. The main program on August 6 and the virtual town halls are free and open to anyone interested in attending.
“We’re excited to celebrate our fifth anniversary and the continued growth of the Foundation by welcoming these three new members,” shared David Morin, Executive Director of the Academy Software Foundation. “These innovative companies are leading the way in the creation of new rendering and cloud-based workflows, and they have already engaged with several of our open source projects. We look forward to seeing what they bring to the Foundation.”
Founded in 2020, Bolt Graphics provides a hardware-accelerated ray tracing solution, enabling users to work with higher fidelity previz, dailies, and also faster final renders. Bolt has also recently expanded its product portfolio to solve rendering performance challenges for architecture & design, virtual production, product design, immersive experiences, and more. Bolt is already leveraging Academy Software Foundation projects including MaterialX, OpenEXR, and OpenVDB, and looks forward to taking a more direct role in the continued development of each.
“Open source is critical to our development effort, as it provides our customers and users the ability to easily bring their work to our platform without undergoing a complicated porting or conversation effort,” shared Darwesh Singh, Founder & CEO of Bolt Graphics. “We have been longtime users of MaterialX, OpenEXR, and OpenVDB, and with membership in the Foundation we’re excited to step up our contributions to these crucial projects.”
CoreWeave is a specialized GPU cloud provider building fast, cost-efficient cloud solutions for compute-intensive applications, including VFX and rendering, machine learning and artificial intelligence, batch processing, and pixel streaming. Founded in 2017, CoreWeave’s offerings also include Conductor, a secure cloud-based service that enables VFX, VR/AR, architecture visualization, and animation studios to seamlessly offload rendering and simulation workloads to the public cloud. CoreWeave is keen to get involved with projects including OpenCue, OpenEXR, OpenColorIO, OpenAssetIO, Rez, and MaterialX.
“Our aim has always been to simplify and streamline access to cloud-based resources for our customers, and a key part of that is supporting their preferred standards and formats, which are increasingly open source. The Academy Software Foundation is guiding the development of many of those important standards and initiatives, and we need to understand where they’re headed to better serve the community. By joining the Foundation, we’re able to gain that insight and also contribute to areas where we have expertise – cloud-first approaches and orchestration,” said Mac Moore, CoreWeave Head of M&E.
OTOY Inc. is a leader in GPU cloud graphics whose Academy Award-winning technology is used by visual effects studios, artists, animators, designers, architects, and engineers to achieve unprecedented levels of photorealism and creative flexibility. Its pioneering technology provides an end to end platform for next generation media production, distribution, and monetization – led by the Render Network, the industry’s first decentralized GPU computing ecosystem for cutting edge holographic media and advanced machine learning applications.
“Open source allows for the most effective collaboration within our industry to give artists the best tools to express themselves,” explained Jules Urbach, CEO of OTOY. “This is important to us as several open source projects such as OpenColorIO, MaterialX, and Open Shading Language are part of the ITMF specification. We look forward to participating in these projects and helping to steer their ongoing development.”
The Academy Software Foundation welcomes new members to support its mission of fostering a healthy open source ecosystem. To learn about more about becoming a member, visit https://www.aswf.io/join/
