Hi @abk
USD Support is being discussed here: OpenUSD Support
Anari support is being added here (by NVIDIA): https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-/merge_requests/10324
Can I expect the future integration of USD with VTK to happen through ANARI?
No, USE will likely be integrated as an Importer, but Importer API we need to be improved to support all USD features
Should I see improvement of render quality in VTK since ANARI will connect VTK with Intel, AMD, Nvidia rendering engines?
Anari is merely a rendering backend. Rendering improvements are being added all the time, eg PBR has been added four years ago.
- https://www.kitware.com/vtk-pbr/
- https://www.kitware.com/pbr-journey-part-2-anisotropy-model-with-vtk/
- https://www.kitware.com/pbr-journey-part-3-clear-coat-model-with-vtk/
Will these improvements come at the cost of reduced parallelism?
Rendering in VTK is usually not the costly part. Computing is and this is unrelated.
How far are we from importing a USD scene into Paraview?
Supporting Importers in ParaView is a completely different issue. ParaView handle its scene and it would be quite a feat to take it away from ParaView. One could extract the geometry from a USD scene and show it to ParaView, this would not be hard to do. glTF is already supported.