Founder and CEO Jensen Huang kicks off SIGGRAPH 2022 with news of the Metaverse while also unveiling a range of new developer frameworks, tools, apps, and plugins to close the gap between the physical and virtual worlds.
Today at SIGGRAPH 2022, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang shared a video address that included the latest news in metaverse, graphics, and research while also unveiling a wide range of new developer frameworks, tools, apps, and plugins for NVIDIA Omniverse. Based on Universal Scene Description (USD), NVIDIA’s building platform for connecting metaverse worlds now includes new AI-powered tools and features, allowing artists, developers, and engineers to build virtual worlds and content more easily. In addition, the tools provide seamless integration with leading 3D applications, including PTC Creo, SideFX Houdini, Unity, and the Siemens Xcelerator platform solutions.
The multi-GPU scalable computing platform is currently used by some 700 leading companies globally, enhancing architectural and product design, simplifying visual effects workflows and building digital twins of factories, cities, and the planet.
“The metaverse is a multitrillion-dollar opportunity that organizations know they can’t ignore, but many struggle to see a clear path forward for how to engage with it,” said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA Omniverse closes the gap between the physical and virtual worlds, and these new tools, technologies, and collaborations make it possible to leap into the 3D internet today.”
Check out the reel showcasing the culmination of over 20 years of NVIDIA rendering, simulation, and AI technology in Omniverse, how artists and developers are leveraging it, and a peek into the applications of metaverse worlds.
New Applications and Frameworks
In addition to launching the NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine, the company unveiled the following platform updates:
Omniverse Kit — a toolkit for building native Omniverse extensions and applications:
- Major updates to PhysX in Omniverse, including real-time, multi-GPU scalable soft body and particle cloth simulation, helping bring more physical accuracy to virtual worlds and objects.
- New OmniLive Workflows - an overhaul of USD-based collaboration in Omniverse, it brings increased speed and performance to multiple app 3D workflows and enables non-destructive USD workflows’ artists and developers to collaborate easier.
- Omniverse Audio2Face - an AI tool that can create facial animations directly from an audio file introduces a leap in AI-driven animation that now can infer and generate realistic emotions and animates all facial features.
- Omniverse Machinima - an app for building 3D cinematics and animated films launches new, free 3D assets from Post Scriptum, Beyond the Wire, and Shadow Warrior 3 games, and a suite of new AI animation tools like Audio2Gesture - an AI that generates realistic arm and body motion from an audio file.
- Omniverse DeepSearch - now available for Omniverse Enterprise, teams use AI to accurately search through large, untagged 3D asset databases of visuals using natural language like “red, rusty barrel.” The tool is a significant advance for game developers and VFX studios with hundreds of thousands of untagged assets that are challenging to search. The award-winning studio, Industrial Light & Magic is leveraging DeepSearch to unlock its library of thousands of environment assets.
As a result of decades of productionILM has a collection of hundreds of thousands of pieces of content that are untagged and impossible to search. With DeepSearch, ILM teams can search intuitively using AI-enabled search.
Also, the Omniverse Extension NVIDIA Modulus, a physics machine-learning framework, is now available to deliver near-real-time performance. The Modulus-trained Physics ML models are 4,000x to 100,000x faster depending on the application while providing unprecedented accuracy, closer to high-fidelity simulations. Modulus is one of the cornerstones of scientific digital twins, including NVIDIA’s Earth-2.
Building the Metaverse with USD Connectors
As part of a collaborative effort with its partners in the industrial, design, simulation, and CAD software ecosystems, NVIDIA unveiled 11 new Omniverse Connectors, which are USD-based plugins. The plugins further open the Omniverse workflows to companies in the industrial and scientific communities and bring the total number of Connectors to the Omniverse USD ecosystem to 112.
Connectors for PTC Creo, Visual Components, and SideFX Houdini are now available in beta. And the ongoing development of Connectors for Blender, Autodesk Alias and Autodesk Civil 3D, Siemens JT, SimScale, Open Geospatial Consortium, and Unity will promote metaverse workflows for manufacturing, engineering, and design companies.
NVIDIA released significant updates to the core simulation technologies representing materials, physics, and light in metaverse worlds.
- NVIDIA MDL, which has served for 10 years as the material standard for a physically accurate representation of 3D materials, is now fully open source, enabling developers to bring material definition language support to any renderer.
- NeuralVDB, coming soon to beta, is the next evolution of OpenVDB and brings AI and GPU optimization to sparse volume datasets and reduces the memory footprint of these massive datasets by up to 100x.
Check out a video comparing NeuralVDB to OpenVDB in multiple water, smoke, and cloud renders showcasing its memory footprint reduction allowing application across scientific and industrial use cases.
Learn more about NVIDIA Omniverse and watch the SIGGRAPH special address.
Source: NVIDIA
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
