As Richard Kerris, VP of Omniverse platform development, noted in a session with to press yesterday, the Omniverse platform in its latest iteration, delivers the world’s first “real-time ray-traced subsurface scattering” renderer. His comment indicates just how powerful NVIDIA high-performance computing technologies are becoming.
Subsurface scattering, as Kerris explains, is when light in a rendering program doesn’t just bounce off objects but instead penetrates the object and scatters around before exiting the other sides. When you hold your hand up to the sun and watch how light penetrates through your fingers, you see subsurface scattering in action. As Kerris added, subsurface scattering is “computationally very hard to do.” So doing it in real-time seems mindblowing.
Microsoft and NVIDIA partner with Accenture demo of NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud in Microsoft Azure.
This amazing development is just one of the many advancements in NVIDIA Omniverse technology.
New with Omniverse
As Kerris noted to the press, NVIDIA Omniverse is a developer’s platform, so readers should think of it not so much as an end-user solution. Software developers build out integration with Omniverse by creating Omniverse Connectors like the one Vectorworks just announced last week. The Nemetschek Group company is one of the latest AEC industry users to create such a connection. Bentley’s LumenRT was also announced as a new Omniverse-connected app.
Omniverse connections continue to grow with more professional 3D applications offering connectors.
Other new Omniverse Connectors include Siemens Teamcenter, Siemens NX, and Siemens Simulate. More important for the AEC community and 3D generalist community is the new Blender Omniverse Connector. The Bentley LumenRT Omniverse connector will be important for Bentley’s infrastructure digital twins solutions and platform professionals, while the Unity, Blender, and Vectorworks connectors will provide AEC and 3D generalists across disciplines to expand their interoperability options to the vast array of tools in Omniverse ecosystem.
Omniverse and the Auto Industry
NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud is a new offering aimed at being a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that will fully unify core products and processes for select enterprises. Initially aimed at the auto industry, BMW is one of the technology offerings’ first customers after being an early Omniverse Enterprise customer. The German automaker is also creating the world’s first virtual auto factory in Omniverse (before it is finished being built), where factory workers can train inside the metaverse (Omniverse) virtual environment.
An image of a BMW factory digital twin in NVIDIA Omniverse.
Operating inside a digital twin allows BMW to see a 30 percent savings in cost as part of the ramp-up of a new auto factory. Training inside a digital twin of their new factory, BMW auto workers can learn about equipment, operations, and setup and improve safety.
“NVIDIA Omniverse has given us an unprecedented ability to design, build, and test complex manufacturing systems, which means we can plan and optimize a next-generation factory completely virtually before we build it in the physical world,” says Milan Nedeljković, board member for production at BMW AG. “This will save us time and resources, increase our sustainability efforts, and improve operational efficiencies.”
To learn more about NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud and see the keynote (click here), visit this page on Omniverse.