CES: NVIDIA Unveils Free Version of Omniverse for Creators

NVIDIA has announced a free version of Omniverse for creatives, of which more than 45 million work in various industries from games, movies, animation, architecture, and more worldwide. An NVIDIA blog post reads:

“We are at the dawn of the next digital frontier. Interconnected 3D virtual worlds…shops, homes people, robots, factories, museums…will be built by an expanding number of creators, collaborating across the globe.”

Omniverse

NVIDIA Omniverse allows artists and creators to collaborate with each other to accelerate 3D work, despite working from multiple software solutions. Each creator can focus on their craft in the process using their preferred best-in-class tools.

NVIDIA Studio creators using GeForce RTX and NVIDIA RTX GPUs can use the solution for free. A new platform development called Omniverse Machinima and Omniverse Audio2Face were announced at a special CES NVIDIA talk.

New platform features include Nucleus Cloud and 3D marketplaces, as well as ecosystem updates that tie-together many tools into the system. Since its open beta a year ago, Omniverse has been downloaded by almost 100,000 creators, who are developing and accelerating creative workflows with its core rendering, physics, and AI technologies.

“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.”

New Omnivers Features

• 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 Marketplaces and Digital Asset Library — give 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.

New Ecosystem Expansion

• 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.

These new app additions add to today’s existing connectors to tools like Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, and many more. Adobe’s Substance 3D Material Extension is coming soon.

Download NVIDIA Omniverse here.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

In the AEC space leading global design leaders like KPF are already on the leading edge with NVIDIA’s Omniverse. Key AEC tools with connectors include those listed in the image below. 

Omniverse AEC connector apps are shown here with more coming in the near future.

But more on the way. Vectorworks Architect’s public road map indicates user interest in Pixar’s USD format which precedes the use of Omniverse. Today AEC professionals can use Autodesk Revit, Trimble SketchUp, Graphisoft Archicad, and other leading design applications.