We’re used to thinking of NVIDIA graphics cards as gaming hardware, but these days they are quickly becoming essential tools for resource-hungry creative work such as 3D rendering, animation and video editing. Used for creativity, NVIDIA RTX technology is so powerful that it’s completely transforming how we do things.
To support this new way of working, NVIDIA has created a platform for creatives called NVIDIA Studio. Part of this platform is a large suite of software that taps into the power of your graphics card and offers features that can accomplish in seconds what used to take hours.
One of the most transformative apps is Omniverse, which makes your 3D software interoperable. It’s based on OpenUSD, a framework that standardizes the exchange of 3D information, enabling different 3D apps to talk to each other. Rather than exporting and importing your scene between multiple applications, you can open it in Omniverse and edit elements of it with different applications simultaneously. Nearly all the major 3D software packages are supported, you just have to install the relevant Omniverse Connector.
In the NVIDIA Studio
To help you get a sense of what can be accomplished with the Studio platform, NVIDIA has created an online portal called In the NVIDIA Studio. Every week there is a new blog post that takes a deep dive into the creative process of an artist who is doing great things with their NVIDIA setup.
This week’s post is a great example of what you can do with Omniverse. Sierra Division is a digital content and art outsource studio that creates asset packs that other artists can use to build environments for films, video games, or any other photorealistic format.
As a remote team, Omniverse is central to their way of working. That’s because not only does Omniverse connect software, it connects people. Everything you do in Omniverse can be done collaboratively from any remote location, so it's a massive boon for distributed teams like this one.
Industrial sci-fi
To demonstrate the amazing level of detail that can be achieved with their Unreal asset packs, Sierra Division creates videos like this one, which was put together using their Industrial Sci-Fi and Modular Oil Rig pack:
The video was a collaborative effort by the team, and Omniverse was instrumental in its creation. The first step was to make an asset library by adding every mesh and element into a large overview scene. Rather than having different kinds of assets flying around, everything is shared in USD format, which makes it very fast for different team members to pick up and recombine the parts they need. Models can be compared side-by-side in a shared space, which makes it easy to work together.
The team’s process for a video like this is to begin with some greybox modular pieces to plan the environment concept and layout of the different structures. Once this is established, the team builds up the detail of the models before adding textures and materials. Most of the artists use Blender for modeling and Substance Painter for texturing, and the OpenUSD framework makes it easy to make quick edits in these apps without having to re-import and set up the asset again.
Custom textures were created in Substance Painter for some of the models, a process which is vastly accelerated by RTX hardware – it’s now possible to bake and optimize assets in mere seconds.
Light me up
With all of the textures and materials in place, the next step is to explore some lighting options to see how the scene feels at different times of day, in the dark, and with different kinds of weather. This was accomplished in the Omniverse USD Composer app with the Unreal Engine Connector, which removed the need to transfer the project between different applications.
For this video, a cloudy sky with some well-placed lights achieved a great look and showed the assets at their best, so viewers can get a good sense of their quality and detail.
Rather than waste time composing the entire environment, the Sierra Division team likes to pick their camera angles early on in the process. By placing cameras in the scene as soon as they have their lighting worked out, they can put their time into making each shot look as good as possible. This way, they get perfectly laid out camera shots and specifically lit renders.
The Explorer’s Room
Here’s another video created by Sierra Division to showcase their Modular Interiors pack based around the idea of an explorer character similar to Lara Croft or Indiana Jones:
The pack contains everything you need to build a motel room cluttered with this character’s paraphernalia, including their rifle and binoculars, as well as artifacts they have collected such as a monkey head and witch doctor sculpture.
At every stage of creation, the artists’ workflows are supercharged by NVIDIA hardware and software. Sierra Division co-founder and creative director Jacob Norris uses a Lenovo Thinkpad P73 NVIDIA Studio laptop. With a setup like this, you get real-time ray tracing in the viewport thanks to the NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine. This technology totally transforms the performance of 3D modeling applications. OptiX uses an AI-accelerated denoiser to accurately anticipate what renders will look like without actually rendering them, which dramatically reduces the time it takes to see a high fidelity image. This means that instead of waiting minutes or hours for changes to appear, your model updates almost instantly – transforming a clunky, disjointed workflow into a smooth and interactive process.
For a project like this, NVIDIA RTX hardware saves the team a lot of time and enables them to make fewer compromises with their work. When changes to your model appear quickly, you can keep tweaking until it’s perfect as opposed to being limited by the constraints of clunky software.
Heist Essentials
Another fun pack from Sierra Division is this Heist Essentials and Tools Collection that has everything you need for a serious bank job, including duffel bags, welding masks and a cascade of bank notes!
Hopefully this insight into Sierra Division’s asset packs and what you can do with Omniverse has got you inspired and excited to create something. Building environments like this used to be prohibitively time-consuming and difficult - now, with technology like this and the availability of high quality art resources, it’s much easier for people to tell their stories and be creative. Just think about what you could make! This is just a taste though – why not head over to In the NVIDIA Studio to learn more about what you could achieve with the NVIDIA Studio platform.
