Khronos recently hosted a webinar about the latest open source glTF tools from Khronos and Blender, including the Blender glTF I/O, glTF Compressonator, and glTF Sample Viewer. The basic workflow demonstrated in this one-hour webinar started with a ray-traced 3D model in Blender, exports it to glTF, sets up image-based lighting using the glTF Compressonator, and finally deploys the assets to the glTF Sample Viewer. The goal was to help attendees understand the upcoming challenges for the production pipeline regarding the adaption of real-time 3D products rendering. There is a short question & answer period at the end of the webinar. Both Video and Slides are now available online.

As glTF adoption has accelerated, its ecosystem has grown into an abundant trove of tools and applications that can generate and import glTF files. However, this ever-growing diversity has created an urgent need for an efficient tool to catalogue glTF resources across the industry—and to enable developers and artists needing to generate or use glTF assets to find the best tools for their projects. To fulfill this community need, Khronos has created the glTF Project Explorer as a centralized searchable directory of projects within the glTF ecosystem.

LunarG has released new Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan header 1.2.131.1. For more detailed information, you may visit the Vulkan SDK Download site.

AMD has announced their TressFX 4.1/Unreal Engine integration and TressFX 4.1/Radeon Cauldron framework implementation. The TressFX library is AMD’s hair/fur rendering and simulation technology. TressFX is designed to use the GPU to simulate and render high quality realistic hair and fur. New in TressFX 4.1 is source code for DirectX 12 and Vulkan.

NVIDIA has added support for profiling applications that make use of Vulkan and OpenGL interoperability. Nsight Graphics 2020.1 is now available for download, and adds new support for 3 Vulkan extensions:

• VK_KHR_shader_clock
• VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_extended_types
• VK_KHR_spirv_1_4

​Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group, has penned an article on the Embedded Computing Design website: ”Open Standards for Accelerating Embedded Vision and Inferencing: An Industry Overview”. The article discusses open interoperability standards and their role in reducing costs and barriers to using inferencing and vision acceleration in real-world products.

Intel has published a new graphics driver for its GPUs (Intel 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th Gen processors) on Windows 10. This new driver (version 26.20.100.7755) comes Vulkan 1.2 support. Complete details and download are now available from Intel. (Source: Geek3D).

This GPUOpen tutorial demonstrates how to integrate FreeSync HDR into a game engine by following the FreeSync HDR Vulkan code sample. The FreeSync HDR API in Vulkan is exposed via extensions that are queried from within Vulkan.

This month, Khronos will be leading a webinar with Norbert Nopper, Managing Director and co-founder of UX3D and member of the Khronos 3D Formats Working Group, on glTF tools, offering a deep dive into glTF IBL sampler, Blender 2.80 glTF import and export, and the glTF Sample Viewer. The webinar will take place on Thursday, January 30, 2020, 9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. P.T. All users of glTF and those considering using glTF as their 3D asset format for 3D commerce are encouraged to attend.

The Khronos SYCL standard as a single-source C++-based programming model for OpenCL. SYCL is one of the elements for Intel’s GPU compute plans with the forthcoming Xe graphics cards and fits into their oneAPI umbrella. Intel just released their SYCL Compiler and Runtimes 2019-12 release with numerous updates. Learn more about this release on Phoronix or visit the Intel LLVM GitHub releases.

Visualization specialist Benjamín Hernández in the Advanced Data and Workflow Group is leading OLCF’s involvement with the Analytic Rendering Exploratory Group within the Khronos Group. Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) recently joined this effort aimed at creating a standardized API for a visualization method called ray tracing, which models the way light behaves to create highly physically accurate images from datasets. The move would allow new visualization software programs and custom visualization codes to more easily run on any computing device—even those with drastically different architecture.

Think Silicon GLOVE v0.4, library which implements OpenGL over Vulkan, been released. GLOVE currently focuses on OpenGL ES 2.0 + EGL 1.4 and is a standalone project. GLOVE 0.4 is the project’s first new release in more than one year and comes with expanded hardware and software support. GLOVE now supports Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS for running OpenGL over Vulkan. (Source: Phoronix)

DreamView, the world leader in the creation of photoreal 3D CGI representations of products for marketing and eCommerce, is proud to announce that it has officially become a member of The Khronos Group. DreamView’s COO, Nathaniel Hunter, was elected to co-chair the subcommittee on ‘Asset Creation and Workflows’ within the new Khronos-governed 3D Commerce Working Group, with the goal of establishing guidelines and standards to align the 3D asset workflow from product design and manufacturing through each stage of retail to end-user delivery, so that 3D representations of products can be experienced consistently across all platforms and devices.

Today @EbenUpton announced that the Raspberry Pi has passed the Khronos OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance tests and is now considered conformant. You may see additional details of the conformance submission on the Khronos Conformant Products page, and read more about what this means in this article.

Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group and Vice President of Developer Ecosystems at NVIDIA, delivers the presentation “Current and Planned Standards for Computer Vision and Machine Learning” at the Embedded Vision Alliance’s December 2019 Vision Industry and Technology Forum. Trevett shares updates on recent, current and planned Khronos standardization activities aimed at streamlining the deployment of embedded vision and AI.