In nuce: At the opening of this year’s Siggraph, Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, announced news about the Metaverse – with a focus on new developments related to Nvidia’s Omniverse. The three main topics of Huang’s speech were: Neural Graphics, Metaverse and Avatars. Rev Lebaredian, Vice President, Omniverse & Simulation Technology at Nvidia, stated that despite the opportunity presented by the metaverse, many companies are struggling to capitalise on it. Rev also sees the Omniverse in the role of closing the gap between the real and virtual worlds.
An outline: Based on USD (Universal Scene Description), Omniverse is getting new AI-supported tools that will serve to connect metaverse worlds. This should make it easier for users to create content via Omniverse. In addition, many tools offer integrations with popular DCC tools such as Houdini or Unity (e.g. the connector for SideFX Houdini is now available as a beta. Connectors for Blender, Alias and Civil 3D from Autodesk are currently under development).
Updates to Omniverse: An overview of some of the innovations presented follows below.
- Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine: Is now being introduced.
- Updates for PhysX: Scalable soft-body & particle clothing simulation – in real time and for multiple GPUs. These innovations should ensure physically correct simulations.
- New Omniverse workflow: The USD-based collaboration in Omniverse has been revised and now works faster and with better performance.
- Omniverse Audio2Face: This is an AI tool that can be used to create facial animations based on audio files.
- Omniverse Machinima: This allows users to build 3D cinematics and animated films. Now includes free 3D assets from the computer games Post Scriptum (a tactical first-person shooter set in the Second World War), Beyond The Wire (a multiplayer first-person shooter set in the First World War) and Shadow Warrior 3 (a first-person shooter with a fantastical setting). Also included: Audio2Gesture: the AI creates realistic-looking arm and body movements based on audio files.
- Omniverse DeepSearch is now also available for the Omniverse Enterprise version. With DeepSearch, users can also search databases filled with 3D assets that have not been indexed. The user uses keywords (e.g. “yellow pyramid”, “high tower” or “pointed octahedron”) to find the objects they are looking for. One prominent user of DeepSearch is Industrial Light & Magic. The video at the end of this article explains how ILM uses DeepSearch.
- Nvidia Modulus extension: Described as a physics-based framework for machine learning that is now designed to work in near real-time.
- 11 new Omniverse connectors (USD-based plugins): This means that Omniverse is currently populated with a total of 112 connectors.
- Nvidia MDL (material standard for physically correct 3D materials) is now open source (see video at the end of this article).
- NeuralVDB is about to enter the beta phase. Compared to OpenVDB, NeuralVDB saves many times more data – while the animated 3D objects have the same visual quality. NeuralVDB is comparable to schemata in the human brain, where information is linked together on different levels at the same time. The video at the end of this article demonstrates how Neural VDB works.
Click further: The video below throws itself into harness for the creative possibilities of Nvidia Omniverse. For much of the information presented in this article, we would like to thank Dan Sarto – co-founder of Animation Word Network. On 10 January 2022 , Digital Production reported on the launch of the Omniverse collaboration platform.
Turn the page: In our print issue 03 : 2022 , we started on page 56 with the first part of our advertorial series on Omniverse. In the first article, with the simple title “Omniverse”, we provided an overview of what Omniverse actually is. One issue later, in DP 04 : 2022, we explained in the article “Getting started with Omniverse” (page 84) how to get Nvidia’s co-operation platform up and running properly.
Industrial Light & Magic and NVIDIA Omniverse DeepSearch
NVIDIA NeuralVDB Brings AI and GPU Optimisation to OpenVDB
Material Workflows in Omniverse with NVIDIA MDL
