During a jam-packed virtual keynote address for CES 2022, tech leader NVIDIA made a range of announcements, debuting over 160 GeForce RTX 30 laptops, games and — notably for animation, VFX and games creators — a free version of its multiverse creation tool Omniverse, plus updates to Studio Laptops designed to power the virtual 3D worlds of tomorrow, today.
NVIDIA Omniverse is now available to millions of individual NVIDIA Studio creators using GeForce RTX and NVIDIA RTX GPUs. The real-time 3D design collaboration and virtual world simulation platform allows artists, designers and creators to use leading design applications to create 3D assets and scenes from their laptop or workstation.
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. At CES, NVIDIA 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.
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 NVIDIA Omniverse ecosystem expands with new Omniverse Connectors, extensions and asset libraries — built by many partners. Today, 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 include:
- e-on software’s VUE, an all-in-one application to create digital 3D nature.
- e-on software’s PlantFactory, a vegetation application to model foliage as well as animation, like wind.
- e-on software’s PlantCatalog, 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 manufacturing and architectural designs.
Built to access and create these virtual worlds, NVIDIA Studio is a fully accelerated platform with high-performance GPUs as the heartbeat for laptops and desktops. This hardware is paired with exclusive NVIDIA RTX-accelerated software optimizations in top creative apps and a suite of tools like NVIDIA Omniverse, Canvas and Broadcast, which help creators enhance their workflows. And it’s all supported by specialized drivers that are updated monthly for performance and reliability — like the January Studio Driver, available starting today.
In addition to fueling Omniverse creativity, announcements for Studio include the availability of GeForce RTX and NVIDIA RTX GPUs to creators. The company has also introduced GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti-based Studio laptops, groundbreaking hardware with heightened levels of performance — especially on battery. On the software side, NVIDIA Canvas has received a major increase in fidelity, new materials and an upgraded AI model, further enabling artists to turn simple brushstrokes into realistic landscape images by using AI.
Watch NVIDIA’s CES address featuring Jeff Fisher, SVP GeForce, and Ali Kani, VP and General Manager Automotive, here.
[Source: NVIDIA]
