Currently, Adobe and Autodesk each support separate but parallel technical specifications for 3D materials: Adobe Standard Material and Autodesk Standard Surface. Both are designed to simplify material development and rendering by enabling the transfer of materials between applications, and they appear almost identical in each. Furthermore, both materials are based on the same sources, including Disney's Principled Shader and Allegorithmic's PBR shading model, with Adobe even referring to Autodesk Standard Surface as a source of inspiration. However, currently, both versions are only supported within the developers' own software: Autodesk Standard Surface is supported in Arnold, 3ds Max, and Maya, while Adobe Standard Material is supported in Substance 3D tools.

OpenPBR is aimed at unifying these two models, making it possible to consistently render materials in Adobe and Autodesk software.
In fact, materials should be viewable in a much wider range of applications, as OpenPBR is a subproject of the open standard MaterialX, supported in a variety of CG programs, including Houdini, RenderMan, and UE5. MaterialX materials are also supported in Blender via the AMD USD Hydra plugin.
At launch, MaterialX will have a reference implementation of OpenPBR. This means that "anything that already supports MaterialX will automatically support OpenPBR."

Created by Adobe and Autodesk under the guidance of the MaterialX Technical Steering Committee, the open-source shading model will replace Adobe Standard Material and Autodesk Standard Surface. OpenPBR 0.2 includes the specification of the OpenPBR Surface shading model and the source code for the reference implementation written in the MaterialX language.

The OpenPBR specification and source code for the reference implementation are available on GitHub under the open-source Apache 2.0 license.