Changing the face and pace of visual workflows

If you‘re a visual professional working in anything from VFX-heavy filmmaking to product design, there’s probably one factor that has had more of an impact on your daily work than any other; your turn-around times have reduced, as have your budgets while your data sets and clients’ expectations have increased.

As artists, we are constantly raising the bar on what we can achieve but this raises some important issues. Knowing that we can create a 3D scene with millions, or even billions, of polygons, huge texture maps and physically accurate lighting and rendering is all good and well. However, clients will make this level of standard the norm and expect consistency ewithout truly understanding the involvement needed from the artist to get there.

Pushing the boundaries

This increases the need for an ever efficient workflow, with clever pipelines and advanced, powerful hardware. The frustrations born from having to edit assets and re-render can be infuriating but thankfully there are tools we can use to help alleviate the pain.

NVIDIA’s Quadro K6000 GPU, with its world leading 12GB of graphics memory really goes a long way to making re-renders a thing of the past.

Being able to turn on effects such as ambient occlusion in the viewport, along with the ability to adjust lighting, with real-time feedback, lets artists push the boundaries without the fear of having to revise the work and wait hours for results.

Painting textures directly from photographic elements in full 3D space, straight onto 3D geometry is an incredibly powerful ability to have and was unheard of just a short time ago. The Quadro K6000 makes it possible. Similarly, Autodesk Maya users can use Viewport 2.0, working with massive data sets and hi-resolution textures, even displaying them on 4K monitors.

Accuracy and realism

Product designers almost always have to create, demonstrate and then tweak multiple iterations of any given product. This is another area where graphical realism is becoming paramount, with clients expecting to see digital versions of products that can be lit and rendered, in real-time, with high levels of accuracy and realism.

Software like RTT Deltagen can use the power of the Quadro K6000 to let users review multiple iterations much faster than previously possible. Changing environments can be done on the fly, as can material changes to the products themselves. No more time consuming and costly renders or illustrations are needed, as all can be provided in a realtime environment.

So, even though the pressure is on to create more, in less time, the NVIDIA Quadro K6000 goes to show that it can be done and done well.

Delivered in conjunction with ZED!

This content was produced in collaboration with HP & Intel as part of ZED - a Pop-Up Studio for the Creative Community held in Soho, London. For more information about ZED and any future events see here.