I couldn’t believe how AI could help me (almost) eradicate technical bottlenecks in my workflow

I’ve been working in the 3D industry for over two decades now, and in that time we’ve seen a heck of a lot of innovation. I’ve witnessed, first-hand, improvements to modelling workflows, material creation, lighting techniques, and rendering technologies. How far we’ve come in this time is truly spectacular.

But despite such wonderful, ground-breaking development, we still experience technical bottlenecks which slow us down and take us away from the process of creating art and being creative. I doubt we’ll ever completely smooth out our workflows such that we don’t experience any friction or frustration, but surely we can make some progress.

As much as most creatives would want to protect the creative process from the tentacles of AI, there are some fantastic emerging tools which can help us with the elements of our workflow that are time-consuming, laborious, and frankly quite boring. Here are three industry-leading 3D design packages which are utilising AI for the good.

1. Adobe Substance 3D

When it comes to creating textures, there’s one application that 3D artists are turning to for producing outstanding results with a relatively simple node-based workflow, and that’s Substance 3D. I first came across it when I was interviewing director and animator Pedro Conti in 2023. He was only beginning to use software back then but was already using it to great effect.

Since then, Adobe has added an impressive set of AI-assisted material and texture tools which make the software not only quicker and easier to use but also able to generate better results. Adobe bringing Firefly generative AI into Substance 3D workflows was and still is an absolute game-changer for the 3D industry.

These AI advancements enable artists to generate textures from text prompts, which “significantly accelerates traditionally time-consuming and intricate 3D texturing". Rather than spending countless hours setting up nodes and parameters, it’s not possible to get 90% of the way towards creating your desired texture with just a simple prompt.

2. Unreal Engine

It is truly mind-blowing to see what real-time gaming engines are now capable of in terms of visual output. I remember Unreal Engine introducing Lumen and how this totally revolutionised global illumination and reflection solutions within a real-time environment.

The revolution didn’t stop there, though. With NVIDIA RTX GPUs, it’s now possible to experience next-gen viewport and rendering features which completely transform workflows and open up a whole world of new possibilities, especially for rendering.

One such area is path tracing with AI denoising. According to Epic Games’ documentation, the “NVIDIA OptiX AI-Accelerated Denoiser library is a GPU-accelerated artificial intelligence trained on tens of thousands of images to reduce visual noise while providing faster denoising times.” Denoising has traditionally been a slow process with variable results, but thanks to NVIDIA RTX GPUs and OptiX technology, it’s faster and more reliable than ever.

3. NVIDIA Omniverse

Running physical AI simulation applications and agentic simulation workflows is not for the faint-hearted. Not only is it complicated, but it’s also hugely hardware-intensive. That’s why many users are turning to NVIDIA Omniverse for its accelerated libraries and microservices.

Omniverse features “GPU-accelerated physics libraries built on NVIDIA PhysX® [which] deliver scalable, USD-native physics for complex simulation, robotics, and industrial digital twin workflows."

This isn’t the only area that NVIDIA RTX technology is accelerating Omniverse workflows. In the area of rendering and simulation, “sensor simulation and physically-based, real-time rendering libraries built on NVIDIA RTX™ help generate synthetic data and simulate physical AI environments at scale.”

Omniverse not only makes it possible to achieve the seemingly impossible but also, thanks to NVIDIA RTX technology, is able to do that in a fraction of the time it would have taken only a few years ago.

More time to focus on what matters most

The bottom line is that NVIDIA RTX acceleration helps turn traditionally slow 3D design into a faster, more efficient process. Tasks that used to take hours can now be carried out by the simple push of a button. Far from removing control from the artist or reducing creativity, these enable creators to focus more of their time and energy on what matters most, making something the people want to see.