NVIDIA Omniverse Available for Early Access Customers

NVIDIA Omniverse, a computer graphics and simulation platform that makes it possible for artists to work seamlessly in real-time across software applications on-premises or around the world via the cloud, is now available for early access customers in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) market.

Using Pixar’s Universal Scene Description and NVIDIA RTX technology, Omniverse allows multiple people to easily work with popular content creation applications and collaborate simultaneously. Omniverse benefits from the flexibility and consistency of the USD interchange format and builds upon it with synchronized workflows.

In this article, Richard Kerris who is the industry general manager for media and entertainment at NVIDIA will share how “NVIDIA Omniverse Available Delivers Interactivity and Collaboration for Early Access Customers”.

Creating visual effects, architectural visualizations, and manufacturing designs typically requires multiple people collaborating across teams, remote work locations, and various customer sites for reviews. Besides, 3D assets take shape using an assortment of software tools.

However seamless data transfers across applications have long been a challenge for millions of artists, designers, architects, engineers, and developers globally. And now using Pixar’s Universal Scene Description and NVIDIA RTX technology, Omniverse allows people to easily work with applications and collaborate simultaneously with colleagues and customers, wherever they may be.

For years, collaborating in visual effects has been through exporting and importing large datasets and scene files. In 2010, Lucasfilm and Sony Pictures Imageworks joined together to create Alembic. This is an open computer graphics interchange framework that helped multiple studios ensure consistency and accuracy when working on the same project.

In addition, Pixar developed USD to provide the interchange of assets and enable collaboration on 3D scenes that may be intricately composed of many elemental assets. With a single scene graph and consistent API, USD delivers a rich toolset for reading, writing, editing and rapidly previewing 3D geometry and shading.

So Omniverse benefits from the flexibility and consistency of the USD interchange format and builds upon it with synchronized workflows. Entire studio teams around the world can collaborate in real-time as they create, with version control support needed to ensure production stays on track.

In Omniverse, the Portals connection module unites top industry tools into a collaborative space for users to work seamlessly on real-time modeling, shading, animation, lighting, visual effects, and rendering, introducing incredible new opportunities for creativity and production.

Up until now, there have been two types of renderers. Real-time rendering is geared toward producing images at 30 or 60 frames per second and adheres to the lowest device targeted for use. On the other hand, Offline rendering focuses on delivering photorealistic final images or scenes that take hours per frame to render with a CPU. To achieve top speeds, many corners often get cut — from simplifying geometry to baking lighting and normal maps — and this can reduce image quality.

To overcome this, Omniverse introduces a new type of rendering with Omniverse View. This module is accelerated by multiple NVIDIA RTX GPUs and built for extreme scalability on arrays of GPUs to provide high-quality, real-time output, even on very large scenes.

Besides, Omniverse View displays the 3D content aggregated from different applications inside Omniverse, or directly in the 3D application being used. It’s also designed to support commercial game engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity as well as offline renderers.

Many industry software leaders are integrating their applications into Omniverse so artists can work collaboratively through the 3D creative process.

Similarly, Omniverse’s Portals is made possible by using Omniverse Kit, a software development kit that enables RTX View capability to be directly integrated into the software partner’s application interface. This gives their product an ultra-high-quality, real-time, ray-traced application viewport.

Since Omniverse is a software-defined platform, vendor applications can also benefit from NVIDIA RTX acceleration or other technologies, like PhysX, as soon as new features become available. NVIDIA has been working closely with companies like Epic Games, Autodesk, Pixar, Adobe, Trimble, McNeel & Associates, and Teradici, with other partner announcements coming soon.

“Epic Games has had a long-standing partnership with NVIDIA,” said Miles Perkins, business development at Epic Games. “Unreal Engine continues to set the standard for the world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D tool for creators. And NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform we are seamlessly connected, enabling an even broader set of third-party products to work with our technology providing cutting-edge photorealistic content, new collaborative workflows, and immersive virtual worlds for games, enterprise, or any discipline dependent on visualization.”

Moreover, Amy Bunszel, senior vice president of Design and Creation Products at Autodesk said: “This technology can give our customers access to immersive, interactive, and collaborative experiences across industries. So we’re thrilled that even more customers will have early access with the expansion of the program announced today at the GTC keynote.”

Prakash Iyer, senior vice president of Software Architecture and Strategy at Trimble Inc share: “We are thrilled to partner with the NVIDIA Omniverse team and leverage this technology to increase the pace of collaboration for our customers,”. And “This tool is very promising for SketchUp customers and the AEC industry.”

During the GTC keynote, Huang shared how some of our customers across various industries are working with the early access version of Omniverse. Industrial Light & Magic is exploring Omniverse in its advanced visual effect productions.

“Omniverse has really shown its versatility by seamlessly integrating with the typical DCC applications used for visual effects, along with embracing open standards for truly portable assets by leveraging USD and integrating MaterialX with MDL for a collaborative experience that was never possible before,”.  This is some words from Francois Chardavoine, vice president of Technology at Lucasfilm & Industrial Light & Magic. “It’s now easier than ever to leverage Omniverse for high-end visual effects workflows.”

NVIDIA has also been working with Lockheed Martin, Foster & Partners, and Volvo Cars.

Volvo Cars is testing Omniverse in its research and development workflows. “We immediately saw the opportunity for real-time collaboration for our design workflow using Omniverse,” said Mattias Wikenmalm, senior visualization expert at Volvo Cars. “It’s something we have been striving for throughout our efforts to optimize our design and development process.”

Additional customers are putting Omniverse to the test in areas such as visual effects, AR/VR, manufacturing, architectural design, and robotics. Each of these verticals has workflows that rely on collaboration, yet are stuck with the traditional process of exporting and importing data. As USD gains wider adoption across the applications, Omniverse will solve key challenges for creative companies worldwide.

The Omniverse early access program is now available to customers that purchase the RTX Server configuration for AEC. They’ll have the ability to be a part of the Omniverse AEC Experience program, which provides the full platform with Portal connections to Autodesk Revit, McNeel Rhino, and Trimble SketchUp.

iRender is a GPU-Acceleration Cloud Rendering Service for Multi-GPU Rendering. At iRender, you can find powerful multiple RTX GPU servers to boost the performance of the rendering process in the NVIDIA Omniverse. One of Omniverse’s developers picked one server and saw it works as well. You can refer to Pekka’s recommendations. He is a professional web designer and video expert Varis and an Omniverse Enthusiastic. So, now it’s time for you to REGISTER immediately and our support team will give you a coupon for testing on strong servers. 

source and image: blogs.nvidia.com