The company’s real-time 3D design collaboration and simulation platform is now available to millions of NVIDIA GeForce Studio creators with RTX GPUs; new Omniverse Machinima and Omniverse Audio2Face platforms also revealed, as well as new platform features and 3D asset marketplaces.
NVIDIA has just announced that NVIDIA Omniverse, its real-time 3D design collaboration and virtual world simulation platform, is now available in a free version for millions of individual NVIDIA Studio creators using GeForce RTX and NVIDIA RTX GPUs. The news was shared by Richard Kerris, Vice President of the Omniverse development platform.
In a special CES presentation (available to view on-demand), the company also announced new platform developments for Omniverse Machinima and Omniverse Audio2Face, new platform features like Nucleus Cloud and 3D marketplaces, as well as ecosystem updates.
With Omniverse, artists, designers and creators can use leading design applications to create 3D assets and scenes from their laptop or workstation. “With this technology, content creators get more than just a fast renderer,” said Zhelong Xu, a digital artist and Omniverse Creator based in Shanghai. “NVIDIA Omniverse and RTX give artists a powerful platform with infinite possibilities.”
Creators like Xu are using Omniverse’s tools to collaborate and build interconnected 3D virtual worlds for entertainment, commerce, and industry. These worlds require a huge amount of 3D content for elements like characters, vehicles, environments… content that is challenging to produce, typically requiring multiple, often incompatible tools.
Here’s a great visual overview of NVIDIA Omniverse for creators – connecting independent 3D worlds into a shared scene:
Since its open beta launch a year ago, Omniverse has been downloaded by almost 100,000 creators who are accelerating their workflows with its core rendering, physics, and AI technologies. The culmination of over 20 years of NVIDIA’s groundbreaking work, Omniverse brings graphics, AI, simulation, and scalable compute into a single platform to enhance existing 3D workflows.
With Omniverse, free for individual users, GeForce RTX Studio creators can connect their favorite 3D design tools to a single scene and simultaneously create and edit between the apps.
Creators can download Omniverse for free here.
Check out how Omniverse is used to enhance animation workflows:
Omniverse Enterprise, the paid subscription platform for professional teams, was announced in November at GTC and is sold through NVIDIA’s global partner network. The platform can be tried free for 30 days. Today’s announcement now brings Omniverse capabilities into the hands of individual creators.
New Omniverse Features
New features within Omniverse include:
- Omniverse Nucleus Cloud enables “one-click-to-collaborate” simple sharing of large Omniverse 3D scenes, meaning artists can collaborate from across the room or the globe without transferring massive datasets. Changes made by the artist are reflected back to the client — like working on a cloud-shared document — but for a 3D scene.
- New support for the Omniverse ecosystem provided by leading 3D marketplaces and digital asset libraries gives creators an even easier way to build their scenes. TurboSquid by Shutterstock, CGTrader, Sketchfab and Twinbru have released thousands of Omniverse-ready assets for creators, all based on Universal Scene Description (USD) format, and are found directly in the Omniverse Launcher. Reallusion’s ActorCore, Daz3D, and e-on software’s PlantCatalog will soon release their own Omniverse-ready assets.
- Omniverse Machinima for RTX creators who love to game — now featuring new, free characters, objects, and environments from leading game titles like Mechwarrior 5 and Shadow Warrior 3, plus Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord and Squad assets in the Machinima library. Creators can remix and recreate their own game cinematics with these assets by dragging and dropping them into their scenes.
- Omniverse Audio2Face, a revolutionary AI-enabled app that instantly animates a 3D face with just an audio track, now offers blendshape support and direct export to Epic’s MetaHuman Creator app. This leaves the tedious, manual blend-shaping process to AI, so artists and creators can spend more time on their creative workflows.
The Omniverse Ecosystem Expansion
The NVIDIA Omniverse ecosystem expands with new Omniverse Connectors, extensions, and asset libraries — built by numerous partners. Currently, there are 14 connectors to applications like Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine - with many more in the pipeline, including an Adobe Substance 3D Material Extension coming soon.
The latest Omniverse Connectors, extensions, and asset libraries include:
- e-on software’s VUE, an all-in-one application that allows users to create digital 3D nature, from skies and volumetric clouds to terrains, large-scale ecosystems, wind-swept vegetation populations, open water bodies, roads, and rocks — all based on nature’s rules – and includes a native Omniverse live link connector that will sync all scene modifications directly to Omniverse stages.
- e-on software’s PlantFactory, a vegetation application that allows modeling of foliage as small as twigs or as big as giant redwood trees from scratch. It also models animation like wind and permits asset export in a wide variety of formats, including a direct link from PlantFactory to Omniverse.
- e-on software’s PlantCatalog, which provides a collection of over 120 ready-made procedural vegetation assets.
- Twinbru, a “digital twin of physical fabric” provider that supplies interior and exterior furnishing fabrics for drapery, sheers, curtains and upholstery applications, offering 21,000 different fabrics and 11,000 digitized fabric twins — all high quality and physically accurate — now integrated into Omniverse to help streamline manufacturing and architectural designs.
Source: NVIDIA
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
