March 29, 2019

DreamWorks Animation Releases USD Manager to the Open Source Community

Glendale, Calif. – March 29, 2019– DreamWorks Animation, A Comcast Company (NASDAQ:
CMCSA) to day announced the launch of USD Manager (usdmanager.org), a graphical tool for
lightweight browsing and editing of Universal Scene Description files (graphics.pixar.com/usd).
This new tool combines the best features of a web browser and text editor into one application,
offering easy inspection of a scene’s hierarchy of files, plus hooks to deeply integrate with other
pipeline tools, and text-based workflows. USD Manager serves as a quick option for prototyping
new ideas, allows simple navigation to files referenced several layers deep in a pipeline,
provides an application launcher for custom file formats, and assists as a learning tool in
understanding the complex hierarchy of shots and assets.

“DreamWorks Animation is committed to a vibrant Open Source community for the industry, with
our strong support of the Academy Software Foundation, and participation in numerous
projects,” said Andrew Pearce, VP of Global Technology at DreamWorks. “We have benefitted
from using Open Source, and we are pleased to continue to contribute back to the Open Source
community in launching USD Manager.”

Mark Sandell, Supervising Technical Director and developer of the new tool, said, “I developed
USD Manager in response to how often TDs and artists would open up one file in a text editor,
find a reference to another file, run a few commands to open a referenced file in another text
editor, and so on, until finally reaching the scene data they were looking for. It was a very
tedious process that I knew we could do something to improve. During the early days of How to
Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World , when DreamWorks decided to adopt USD, I was happy
to expand an earlier tool I’d developed to now work with this new format. It has since proved
invaluable in our rapid adoption of USD across multiple departments and active projects, and
has become an essential tool in the day-to-day workflow for our Technical Directors. We use
USD Manager daily in conjunction with existing open-source tools like usdview, and I’m happy
to see it speed through technical barriers, allowing us to test new creative ideas, and push our
feature film pipeline forward. ”

“At Pixar we are doubly excited about DreamWorks’ release of USD Manager. It’s thrilling to see
the open-sourcing of such a substantial piece of work that builds on USD, and is a great
validation of the decision to open-source USD itself. We are also eagerly anticipating using it
ourselves in both R&D and production, as it is a fantastic debugging and learning tool for USD
compositions”, said F. Sebastian Grassia, Lead Engineer of the USD project.
DreamWorks began development of USD Manager in 2017 and has extended and improved it
over the course of several feature film productions.

About DreamWorks Animation

DreamWorks Animation (DWA), a division of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, within
NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation, is a global family entertainment company
with feature film and television brands. The company’s deep portfolio of intellectual property is
supported by a robust, worldwide consumer products practice, which includes licensing, and
location-based entertainment venues around the world. DWA’s feature film heritage includes
many of the world’s most beloved characters and franchises, including Shrek, Madagascar,
Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, Trolls and The Boss Baby , and have amassed
more than $14.5 billion in global box office receipts. DreamWorks Animation’s television
business has quickly become one of the world’s leading producers of high-quality, animated
family programming, reaching consumers in more than 190 countries. Creating a diverse array
of original content in a variety of formats and delivering deep, fully immersive worlds served up
with compelling characters, the prolific studio has garnered 22 Emmy Ⓡ Awards since inception
in 2013.