The Keynote

CEO Andrew Anagnost was the keynote speaker for the first general session. He is passionate about his vision for the future. I am impressed by his leadership for the company while thinking about the environment we live in. He has a vision that must be admired because he believes in the future he talks about.

CEO Andrew Anaghost talks up AI and the criticality of data for all creative industries Autodesk serves, from the AEC/O industry, the D&M (design & manufacturing) industry, to the M&E (media & entertainment) industry.

The message for this year illustrated their path forward with Autodesk AI and how it is being implemented into their platforms. Data was a big focus on how to improve AI (artificial intelligence) and how it can help creators. There is some delicacy in handling the subject of generative AI due to backlash from artists who don’t want to be replaced by AI and what they may see as a violation of their creative copyrights. Autodesk is trying to make AI a tool that can benefit pipelines working with creatives since it would not be in Autodesk’s best interest to replace the actual people who buy their software.

Data Story

“Data” was a heavily mentioned subject related to AI training. Autodesk made a considerable investment in AI to help save time and money for their end users. I believe that the vision can include both artists and AI working together, but this is something that would require collaboration on both sides. I think if you are an artist or client with reservations about the impact of AI, you should share your thoughts with Autodesk because they are interested to hear them.

In terms of AI and data, Autodesk products include these three basic principles to increase productivity to help their clients’ businesses:

• Data Granularity–multiple disciplines can work together.
• Data Interoperability–connect AutoCAD and other products, including non-Autodesk products, to their ecosystem.
• Data Access–get data when or where you need it. 

Autodesk customers increased spending by 72 percent this year by adopting the new technologies to their pipeline. 

Some of the reasons they adopted Autodesk’s new tools are:

• 1/3 saved on increasing cost in construction
• 1/3 helped create jobs for architects who were out of a job
• 1/3 saved on materials wasted.

There have been some ups and downs about the subject of AI. RAND recently published a report that stated that “By some estimates, more than 80% of AI projects fail at twice the rate of the failure of information technology projects that do not involve AI”

Apple recently published a study exposing the deep cracks in LLM’s “reason capabilities.” Six engineers from Apple showed that the mathematical reasoning used by advanced large language models can be unreliable and brittle in simple problems.

AI continues to be center stage at Autodesk University as all software companies must have a comprehensive AI strategy for their products. Earlier in the year, Autodesk released their AEC Data Model API that will help support more granular data across Autodesk Docs, which is now connected to Autodesk Forma, the AEC industry cloud solution from Autodesk.

Autodesk is a company at the forefront of technology. Because they have been working with developers for many years, they have foreseen many of these problems and built redundancy and will exercise all caution before a product release. The RAND paper reflects mostly startups without the expertise of a company like Autodesk. I would imagine Autodesk works with partners to ensure that the language models in their AI are used with human interaction to reduce flaws.

“Data“ was a word mentioned in every General Session, Keynote, and numerous industry sessions. The focus was to help customers understand how to share their data when using AI to get better results by teaching the AI about how they work. In the final analysis, Autodesk wants to target AI at redundant tasks and gain efficiencies and optimization. In the end, the data used is critical to AI as it must be trustworthy and accurate in order to get good results about AI-based systems.

Autodesk & LA 2028 Olympics

Autodesk partnered with the LA Olympic committee to help design and make transportation and retrofit current housing and sports venues for the athletes and fans. Autodesk will be involved in helping plan several projects at the Olympics while providing data and analysis information to help make it work. LAX airport is one of those projects. July 28, 2028, is the opening ceremony for the Games.

Autodesk Platform Services

The keynote had a different approach this year, and, in general, Autodesk University had a different feel than in recent years. I felt like it was geared more towards new customers, and very understandably so. The AEC/O industry has generally been slow to adopt newer technologies, and the influx of AI will take the AEC/O industry some time. Anagnost noted that AI has sped past the hype phase and has entered the phase of lowered and more reasonable expectations. From there, software companies will best figure out what AI can practically and reasonably do for users. (for more info on the Gartner Hype Cycle, read this feature and see the chart below.)

The Hype Cycle was made famous by Gartner. Image: Wikipedia Commons.

AI is a major change to customer pipelines, which means upfront costs. AI is not just about software; it may include needing newer hardware. Autodesk spoke about how this computing power can be harnessed over their cloud, introducing Autodesk Platform Services. APS provides a cross-industry set of APIs with shared capabilities and services to connect industry clouds, products, and other solutions. You can personalize your technology ecosystem from your desktop to co-workers to the client. Autodesk Hub allows access to your data in bite-size chunks; move it where you need it.

Autodesk added Australian servers to expand their reach globally. I don’t know how the price point works for customers, but if it can save your project time and money, it is worth investigating. 

Autodesk Docs

Autodesk Docs is the hub that connects all of Autodesk’s software with the ability to share information and data more securely. One hundred-plus new features have been added to Autodesk Docs.

Autodesk Docs is a safe and secure way to protect your data while collaborating with others on projects. Autodesk Docs can integrate all of Autodesk’s products. They will soon have third-party integrations so that other companies and their products—from AEC/O products from companies like Trimble, Bentley, and Nemetschek Group to media and entertainment companies like Maxon, Chaos, and The Foundry—can all seamlessly interconnect applications across competing platforms and ecosystems.

AU: Autodesk advances Forma, Docs and intros Forma Board

While Autodesk is hopeful that Autodesk Docs will become the center of the data universe in AEC/O, their competitors just mentioned won’t rush their clients to that outcome. Instead, particular projects and their leadership will selectively decide on Docs as the information hub for the project, and third-party tools will then rush to complete API connections in the interest of best serving mutual customers. (Architosh has another AEC/O-centric AU story coming up written by Anthony).

Fusion

Fusion is the industry cloud for manufacturing and product design pipeline that connects everyone working in the pipeline throughout the product lifecycle.  Fusion has 300% new improvements. Creators can be assured they have access to the correct data.

Autodesk Forma Board is a new solution powered by Autodesk Docs.

You can read and write to the data manufacturing model in the cloud. You can save Vault Inventor files in Fusion. This can shorten the design process, especially with new tools to give you the ability to sketch out something quickly in 3D in such packages as Bernini. Wavve Mobility used Fusion to digitize prototypes of their cars, quickly importing from multiple data formats with collaboration in the cloud. This saved Wavve money on costs and time on the design process.

Bernini

Bernini is a research effort. It is a conceptual design tool. It can convert any sketch you make into a 3D model. Bernini is available for free with no date on a commercial release.

The demonstrations for Bernini were interesting. People who can barely draw can create a concept 3D model from a rough sketch. This is a great tool for early ideas that are AI-generated for a base model, saving time building it from scratch.

Bernini has sketch constraints, so you don’t have to manually rework a model. The end target is to have a model that is more constructable than just a loosely formed mesh. This tool could be used for different use cases across architecture, product design, and entertainment, focusing on generating 3D structures or objects. These objects could be built or manufactured because they work in the real world. 

Revit/AutoCAD

Revit is the dominant BIM tool in North America, and it has an estimated 4 million users worldwide. Revit 2025 was released earlier this year and has new features that will make it a more useful tool for design and documentation. You can now export to PDF in the background, which will help many users publish large PDF sets.

AutoCAD, with a 39.9 percent market share, has had some major improvements. There is a new animated search feature, and AutoCAD 2025 can open files twice as quickly as AutoCAD 2024. Overall, Revit and AutoCAD have over 500 new features this year.

An image of BIM 360 in action with its sectioning features shown.

I went on a tour hosted by Gensler for the Life Sciences campus in the Research and Development District hosted by Ralph Linder, Benjamin Regnier, Ian Doherty,  and Kerstin Kraft from Gensler and  Jeff Oesterblad, Tam Tran and Jeff Dauz from IQHQ. The tour illustrated the beautiful design of the campus using Revit. The land originally belonged to the Navy and was built in an old Tuna Harbor. Gensler had to create a boat or 30-foot retaining sea wall to keep the water out of the site. 

Forma

Forma is Autodesk’s industry cloud for architecture, engineering, construction and operations (AEC/O) and a multi-year award winner in Architosh’s annual AIA Best of Show award honors.

The big announcement at AU for Forma was the new collaboration between ESRI and Forma. ESRI terrain data ARC GIS is now integrated into Forma. Forma connects design teams with a new, added whiteboard, which enables information from other packages to come into Forma so everyone can share it.

Autodesk Forma expands its connection with Esri’s ArcGIS to help architects and planners design with location in mind.

Forma can access Revit data through Autodesk Docs. It can directly import that data back to Revit. Forma AI Carbon gives you information about the carbon impact before you lay the concrete. Baker Barritos shared a presentation using Forma to design a space and how Forma helped change the location of the building due to humidity and wind data. It is like a time machine letting you see the future of your design in a real-world situation. Forma Explorer AI is rolling out soon.

Robot

Autodesk showed off a robot that captured the attention of the audience. The robot can capture information from a site (elevations, topo, and more) in real-time, providing much-needed data for projects. It is accessible anywhere at any time. It connects the data it collects to Autodesk Docs. This helps to keep everyone on the same page. The images that the robot captures are in high resolution to ensure you get the detailed data you need.  

MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

Autodesk has a long history with the entertainment industry, providing some of the most powerful tools for animation and visual effects.  Pixar, Disney, Illumination, and DreamWorks are a few of the companies that use these media and entertainment tools.

Wonder Studio

Autodesk announced the purchase of Wonder Studio at AU. Wonder Studio has real-time tools for creating and animating characters quickly. They can be added to live-action scenes quickly. The software uses AI to analyze the live-action scene, from lighting to texture, to make it easy for the character to match the scene.

Wonder Studio is the latest acquisition by Autodesk in the M&E division.

The demos for the software were impressive. In my professional opinion, working in VFX and animation, Wonder Studio is not at a professional level for high-end production. However, Wonder Studio is an excellent concept tool and great for new indie filmmakers with limited animation skills who want to create small films to tell their stories.  It can create motion capture by tracking an actor and applying the data to a character in a scene. It is an excellent option for new filmmakers who can’t use Unreal Engine or Unity due to their learning curve. 

Maya & 3DS Max

Maya and 3DS Max are the workhorse of the animation industry and for games. Over the years, the two software packages have been integrated into both pipelines to create some of the best films and video games on the market.

Maya is now connected to Flow, the production tracking software that replaced ShotGrid (Shotgun). You can now see the shots before and after the shots you are working on in Maya for better continuity. Maya has a new Dope Sheet with motion trails, making it easier for animation.

Maya & Max support a Smart Extrude feature and Open PBR with Adobe. This should make texturing easier when working with Substance products. Maya can do complex deformation with the new Deform AI tool meant for animators. Max introduces a Boolean Modifier, which is a game changer that is faster and more efficient.

Maya and Max now support OpenUSD and SVG.  There is a USD camera and control in Max to help frame shots better. Ty diffusion (TyFlow) is an advanced implementation of Stable Diffusion in 3DS Max. It can be used to generate AI images and animation. Arnold, the renderer, now has an AI Denoiser that will save time in rendering. 

FLOW

Flow integrates the best elements from ShotGrid. Flow is a powerful production tracking software used in production for animation, visual effects, and video games. Flow can handle all aspects of production and coordinate the pipeline with AI tracking so that changes are dynamic. 

Flow will make collaboration between producers and teams more efficient by making connections between previously siloed parts of the pipeline accessible to all. Flow Capture gives creatives and producers the ability to do an immediate review. Flow Tracking responds to scheduling through AI. Flow allows you to do the heavy computing for effects in the cloud, so you don’t have to wait for shots and do other tasks.

CHAOS Group

Third-party software company Chaos Group was exhibiting its new Chaos Envision, a brand-new real-time 3D assembly and animation tool that turns the most difficult and demanding design data into interactive realism.

Another view of Enscape Impact—released as part of Enscape version 4.1 back in the summer of this year.

Enscape Impact is the building performance add-on that helps you make more sustainable, eco-friendly design decisions. (see: Architosh, “Q&A with Chaos Enscape—Improving the Design Workflow,” 16 Oct 24) A new version of V-Ray for Blender brings the best of V-Ray to a wider audience. Chaos Cloud services will include virtual tours and the ability to view, navigate, and collaborate on complex projects using any device. There were some AI announcements, including AI Enhancer for Enscape and Gaussian splats in beta for V-Ray 7. 

Closing Thoughts on AU24

Autodesk University did have great sessions for more details about how all their products work in the pipeline. Still, for those in Media & Entertainment, those sessions were not for experienced professionals.

Half of the people who went to Autodesk University this year were new to the show. It was very different being at AU after the downturn in the entertainment business because the Media & Entertainment people were not there. Autodesk once did elaborate displays with celebrity-level professionals in the entertainment business, but that is not the case anymore.

AEC/O is a growing business with clients trying to save money while working on building new projects quickly and sustainably. In the IT industry, everything is moving to the cloud, but in several cases, there remains no immediate viable path for migrating customers and legacy data to the cloud as well. Autodesk is in the difficult stage of producing three new industry clouds for customers to move to while helping those customers migrate from old legacy desktop solutions.

AEC/O is a critical industry for Autodesk and perhaps the industry where it stands the most to gain or lose. For AEC/O, Autodesk continues to push on all fronts with new updates to Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC), Forma—its cloud for AEC—and its key desktop era platforms for CAD and BIM, AutoCAD, and Revit, respectively. Autodesk Tandem is the company’s primary digital twin platform and is also cloud-based.

The biggest example of this is Forma for AEC/O. While there were hints of drawing capabilities coming to Forma in the near future, for now, architects and engineers on Autodesk Revit rely on that BIM tool or AutoCAD for all their drawing documentation. Meanwhile, the D&M tool Fusion (the cloud tool for that industry sector) is forging ahead with Drawing Automation for Fusion, using AI to help automate the drawing workflows. We have heard at Architosh of potential automated drawings in Forma, while other sources have revealed such capabilities in Revit.

While AU2023 was the year Autodesk announced its big AI plans, this was the year that the design software giant talked up the importance of data and has made several big data-related plans and acquisitions this year. (see: Architosh, “Autodesk acquires Datum360—democratizes data access in AEC,” 25 June 2024).

Considering the union strikes and new legislation, it should be clear that data and AI are touchy subjects for many users in all industries Autodesk serves, not just media and entertainment. It should be clear how the data is being used. There are some Autodesk clients who don’t and can’t share their data, and Autodesk licenses their technology to these customers.

Autodesk’s focus on AI and data at AU 2024 shows that the company is at a crossroads. Change is in the future. And software competition has increased with rival software packages.

In addition, what we have learned from the post-pandemic is that remote work is here to stay. Autodesk has been an innovator for years, and I hope they listen to their clients so they can keep growing and innovating as a company. Their challenge is to help customers not just learn how to leverage the new AI tools but also, in many cases, help them migrate to the new cloud apps with ease.

I am an Autodesk customer, so I want to see the success of their plans and initiatives. Let’s see what happens next year.

The post AU24: Autodesk University—It’s All About the Data appeared first on Architosh.

The Future and AI

CEO Andrew Anagnost welcomed attendees with an upbeat keynote and spoke about the release of their upcoming 2024 Report, “State of Design and Make,” about the state of the business of creating. 77% of the companies interviewed for this report say they plan to increase or strongly increase AI in their infrastructure. What is interesting about this report is how the statistics and percentages give professionals an understanding of where technology and their businesses are headed. Look for this report in 2024.

Autodesk AI is being discussed at AU2023 by Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost. (Image: Autodesk)

Ryan Reynolds made a rare appearance at the second keynote at Autodesk University. He talked about his partnerships with Autodesk on his new stadium renovation for his soccer club and contributions to his organizations for helping up-and-coming creative talent.

Autodesk is committed to bringing digital technical solutions to its users. It wants to empower its users to be more productive, sustainable, and stronger by using technology. This point was made very clear by the CEO of Autodesk, Andrew Anagnost, who is passionate about the direction of Autodesk and the future it will help create with its users. AI was at the core of the conversation.

Keynote

“Today, we are announcing Autodesk AI. Autodesk AI is a technology we’ve been working on and investing in for years. It powers our ‘Design and Make’ platform and our industry clouds. We’re putting AI to work because we know it’s going to transform the way you work,” Andrew Anagnost explained to his audience.

He explained how Autodesk has been developing its AI through its product line over the past decade.

Jeff Kinder, EVP of Design and Manufacturing at Autodesk, spoke about Fusion, their industry cloud for manufacturing. Fusion is changing the Design and Make process, which is powered by Autodesk AI. It allows you to design where your thoughts are rather than thinking about the tool to do it.

Data sits at the center of artificial intelligence, so users must move forward in recognizing the importance of using the data features in the design tools they use today. (Image: Autodesk)

You can see all the relevant data for the product’s life cycle from the beginning to see how it performs and is manufactured. Fusion is being developed to have automated templates for computer-aided manufacturing tool paths that can be adjusted by users as needed.

Autodesk talked about their acquisition of Blank AI’s capabilities for conceptual design ideas for the automotive industry with increased positive outcomes with 3D models that can be created, studied, and edited in real-time using semantic controls and natural language without using advanced technical skills. Autodesk Fusion users can create product designs that are auto-created by AI to optimize the manufacturing method and performance and save on costs.

Diana Colella, EVP of Entertainment & Media Solutions, talked about how Autodesk is building Flow – Autodesk’s industry cloud for Media & Entertainment. The idea is to provide an open ecosystem that connects the different phases of production together with one solution.

Flow will leverage open standards like Universal Scene Description (Open USD) to ensure interoperability. Flow has generative scheduling features that can help productions manage shifting changes in creating a television show, animation, film, or video game. Generative scheduling can do what once took days in minutes.

Autodesk Flow technology uses AI to automate certain tasks for artists, like keying, sky replacement, beauty work, and camera tracking. AI workflows coming to Maya provide a new way to interact with Maya with language prompts. A collaboration with Wonder Dynamics will power a new Maya plug-in to automatically animate, light, and compose computer-generated characters for live-action scenes.

Autodesk revealed its new logo at AU23. It seems like the company recently did a logo change, but here they are doing it again. The new logo looks great. (Image: Akiko Ashley for Architosh. All rights reserved.)

My question about Flow is, will it incorporate Entertainment Partners Movie Magic Budgeting and Scheduling or their Scenechronize (Production Management software) to Cast & Crew’s Studio+? Will Flow start out mostly in post-production until these parts of production become part of the Flow ecosystem? Production can be complex in live action with actors, writers, unions, and an ever-changing landscape. I hope Flow is a flexible solution that can help manage the digital tools, but hopefully, it can become a much more robust solution for the entire process.

Amy Bunszel, EVP of Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Design Solutions, stated, “I believe that AI should augment you, not replace you.” She announced that in the next year, Autodesk would expand Forma’s capabilities.

Forma provides data analysis for wind, noise, and operations that enable teams to plan better outcomes for projects. InfoDrainage, the Machine Learning Deluge Tool, gives feedback on placement for retention ponds and swales to prevent and reduce the impact of water disasters.

Amy Bunzel speaking during the AEC Industry Media Analysts session. (Image: Autodesk)

AutoCAD is using AI to analyze documents by reading handwritten and digital markups to easily manage changes. Construction IQ uses the power of AI to predict, prevent, and manage construction risks that can impact safety, cost, and schedule.

I think Forma is a powerful tool and is just at the beginning of becoming something more impactful. (See: Autodesk, “Film: Nordic Office of Architecture—how new technology opens up new opportunities for design, collaboration and business,” 8 May 2023) I remember architects in California having a hard time getting structural engineers after the pandemic due to a backlog that raised costs and made coordination difficult. I hope Forma brings teams together to make this part of construction faster, more efficient, and cost-saving and keep teams on the same page.

Raji Arasu, EVP Chief Technology Officer, explained the depth of the use of AI for Autodesk users, explaining these AI tools should make everything faster and more efficient and empower users not to replace people or creatives in the pipeline.

Andrew Anagnost explained to the user base that AI is meant to be a starting place to augment your ideas so you can get things done and reduce the time spent on a process that you do over and over and doesn’t need to be repeated. It can reduce unproductive tasks and eliminate them. AI can learn from your workflow and help automate tasks while helping to reduce waste and cost. AI can go through different scenarios and suggest the best solutions, making your company more productive.

Andrew Anagnost also announced Workshop XR, which is an immersive design and review workspace connected directly to Autodesk Construction Cloud in collaboration with META. It gives teams in architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AEC/O) a workspace to review 3D models and their data, providing improved and efficient design reviews in real-time.

It gives design teams a review where they can walk through models on a one-to-one scale and understand how the data from the project can translate into the real world.

Teams can track and catch errors and have a spatial understanding before projects go into the construction phase. This can be a cost-effective solution, saving budget costs not discovered in traditional methods. You can make better decisions to save on costs and do better sustainable design. The more information you have upfront helps save money, reduce waste, and reduce unnecessary travel.

Autodesk Workshop XR is available for Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest Pro, and Meta Quest 3 headsets.

For more information, go to https://workshopxr.autodesk.com/.

Next Page: AU 23 EXPO Highlights

The post AU23: Autodesk University ‘Design and Make’ 2023—Our Report appeared first on Architosh.

Introduction

This year the convention’s focus was strictly on AI (artificial intelligence). Attendance was lower than in previous years, and the Exhibits Hall was one-third of the size I remember before the global pandemic. The “new normal,” as they call it, is bearing out on physical events in possibly a permanent way. Though vendors are using meeting rooms, the meeting rooms were located upstairs where demonstration artists could do their presentations without interruption. You didn’t need a full conference badge to attend these sessions.

SIGGRAPH 2023 had smaller visitors than in the past prior to the global pandemic, but one can’t also rule out the writers strike and its impact on types of film industry professionals who normally attend this conference.

The entire second floor was filled with meeting rooms completely swamped by attendees lined up for the sessions by their vendor of choice. I spent some time in the Unreal Engine, Houdini, and NVIDIA presentations. The meeting rooms worked; I could focus on what the presenter was saying, considering the complexity of the subject matter. As I noted earlier, the big focus was on AI and ML.

AI is a controversial subject considering the current strikes with WGA and SAG-AFTRA. AI is a crucial component in the negotiations, as the guilds ask that AI not replace the many jobs today filled by people. It is possible the strikes may have influenced the low attendance numbers at the show this year, but that is just a hunch. 

AI, Digital Twins, and USD

There are three critical inter-related technology trends impacting all 3D digital industries right now, and they were talked about and shown extensively at SIGGRAPH 2023. Aside from AI, Digital Twins, and USD (now OpenUSD) are all playing a major role. For example, Architosh recently covered the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), which was backed by Pixar, Apple, Adobe, Autodesk, and NVIDIA.

This year meeting rooms rivaled the expo floor for showcasing new software and hardware at SIGGRAPH 2023 as attendees found the new format interesting and helpful.

AI is definitely a hot trend impacting the AEC/O industry, as Architosh writes about extensively, especially in its monthly newsletter devoted to emerging technologies, Xpresso. Also, digital twins are a big part of NVIDIA’s Omniverse which is powered by USD.

Amazon, BMW, and other major corporate companies are using digital twins to create factories, in-house robotics, and warehouse designs that are more efficient. They don’t build anything until they refine it in the digital twin first. Autodesk, Adobe, and Epic Games (Unreal Engine) are some of the companies using AI to make their software do tasks faster so you can get things done in real-time or work with someone else simultaneously.

The release of Meta Humans from Unreal Engine allows AEC professionals using the engine to populate their renderings and animations with photo-realistic people. It didn’t require learning how to model or animate humans. This is one example of cutting-edge technology crossing over industry boundaries. 

The Big Open Standards Push

The Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) could be said to be just as crucial as AI in 3D industries because it helps propel the advancement of the Metaverse (Omniverse in NVIDIA’s case). This big support for a unified standard in OpenUSD likely means both AEC/O and the D&M (design and manufacturing) industries and their leading tools will soon be supporting this new format, and it will impact workflows possibly dramatically.

OpenUSD and its massive industry support mean the AEC/O industry, in particular, has a new interoperability champion for users and software vendors alike to push forward. This is encouraging news and specifically addresses the lock-in issues and other grumblings from those AEC/O users who signed either of the two versions of the Revit Open Letters. (see: Architosh, “The Revit Open Letter Through the Lens of QWERTY-Nomics,” 20 Oct 23).

SIGGRAPH was once a place for key announcements from major vendors but due to a change in the business climate, most key updates are announced at their own events and keynotes, and the new announcements on the show floor are more from new fresh faces in the tech arena. Let us now talk about Jensen Huang’s SIGGRAPH 2023 keynote talk and what NVIDIA has introduced lately and showcased at the show. 

NVIDIA CEO the new Steve Jobs?

When Jensen Huang first stepped out on the stage, it reminded me of Steve Jobs. Every person in the room was eagerly awaiting to hear what he had to say. There are actually “Jensen groupies.” I can say he didn’t disappoint with his charismatic charm.

NVIDIA’s new Grace CPU is a custom ARM-based chip and a super chip for AI workloads in all kinds of industries.

The first thing he showed us was the new GH (Grace Hopper) chip. It is an ARM-based super chip for AI. It is ten times cheaper using less power, making it much more affordable. He began explaining how building servers from NVIDIA GPUs was far cheaper than doing it with a conventional Intel or AMD CPU. He said, “The more you buy, the more you save,” as showed a large server array behind him, demonstrating the powerful hardware to power AI while reducing power and cost. 

NVIDIA CEO stars at SIGGRAPH 2023, keynote addressee.

NVIDIA announced a partnership with Hugging Face Platform for generative AI models that has over 250,000 models that you can fine-tune for whatever you need. Hugging Face will integrate its training service with NVIDIA’s Cloud GPU. NVIDIA announced Enterprise 4.0, a significant upgrade to their enterprise AI software so organizations can use a toolkit to process generative AI. NeMo allows developers to build and customize large-scale models with billions of parameters. NVIDIA also announced AI Workbench, which will enable users to work on a PC flexibly, NVIDIA’s DGX Cloud, or other cloud services and move between these locations with just one click. 

Omniverse evolves at NVIDIA, reshaping manufacturing, transportation, and telecommunications industries. Omniverse is a tool that lets architects, engineers, and construction companies work with their artists and designers in real time on architectural visualizations in 3D. It helps create realistic visualization by using USD (OpenUSD). NVIDIA made significant updates to Omniverse, enhancing the rendering power of Omniverse and adding more centralized tools that simplify the management of Omniverse for Developers.

The new Alliance for OpenUSD will truly accelerate the adoption of this new open 3D standard.

New RTX workstations were announced with three new GPUs, RTX 5000 (available), RTX 4500 (coming October), and RTX 4000 (coming in September). The RTX 4000 could be the most potent single-slot GPU. I saw the Z8 Fury on the show floor by HP; it was stacked with NVIDIA GPUs with room for two terabytes of RAM. Again, as Jensen Huang says, “The more you buy, the more you save.”

A maxed-out HP workstation with NVIDIA’s latest GPUs.

To learn more about NVIDIA visit them online here: https://www.nvidia.com

Here are some cool announcements from some new companies and some you may already know.  

CAVRNUS

Cavrnus is a visualization tool that delivers spatial vision with stunning graphics with a multi-person presence, including voice, video, and screen share. The 3D interactive workflows for Unity and Unreal Engine, plus additional tools, including a robust SDK with a suite of APIs. Cavrnus is a bit like Omniverse in how you can communicate inside of Unreal or Unity in real time to work on projects together and communicate and manage your experience across platforms and communities. I watched as a group of people communicated in Unreal Engine in real time about designing a space. The users used both chat and videos to communicate their needs and their designs. This tool may be coming to Twinmotion soon, but I can’t deny or confirm this.

https://www.cavrnus.com

MATEREAL

Matereal is a French start-up founded in 2021 based on research of the Tribology & System Dynamics Laboratory (LTDS) of the ENTPE. They specialize in measuring materials’ visual appearance based on realistic and physically accurate 3D rendering. Matereal is building a library of textures and shaders they have created using these materials for architectural visualization, animation, and VFX. They provide high-precision spectral BRDF and their equivalent in sRGB and XYZ color spaces for various 3D renderers. The company specializes in measuring surfaces based on the renderings’ look accuracy. They also offer a service to users to measure a material they’d like to use in a rendering and make it realistic and accurate.

https://matereal.net

UNITY WETA TOOLS

WETA Tools, which was acquired by Unity in 2021, had a large meeting room on the second floor of the Convention Center. One great tool they introduced, Speedtree 9.5, allows for photo-realistic trees and vegetation that look better than many other procedural trees with shapes and sizes that work on any scale. This will help with architectural renderings to help them feel more life-like and more varied.  

Other tools WETA Tools introduced at SIGGRAPH include:

• WETA Tools:
• Deep Comp (GA)
• Eddy (GA)
• Wig (beta SIGGRAPH)
• Ziva VFZ 2.3 (GA)
• Ziva RT (trainer, player, animator (GA)
• Speedtree 9.5 (GA SIGGRAPH) (GA-Sept.)
• Speedtree Asset Library (Sept)
• Cloudtree (Beta Sept)

https://unity.com/solutions/unity-weta-tools

VICON 

Vicon debuted its markerless motion capture technology in collaboration with Artanim, the research arm of Dreamscape, a leading VR company. Vicon showcased a six-person markerless real-time solve set in Dreamscape VR called “The Clockwork Forest.” It was fun interacting with others to solve a puzzle. It is rather impressive and works to keep you from feeling nauseous. It is worth knowing about this technology as the dawn of the Metaverse approaches.

https://www.vicon.com

WACOM

Wacom had a booth showing off the new Cintiq 27 with a virtual production setup for the new Cintiq. They also announced the new Wacom One family of tablets, which are four tablets in two varieties. Wacom One 12 ($399) and Wacom One 13 touch ($599) are pen display tablets with built-in screens while also introducing two new traditional pen tablets with no display Wacom One S ($99) and Wacom One M ($149.99).

Wacom Cintiq Pro 27 professional monitor with pen-support.

Wacom One 12 and 13 tablets have displays that are great for PC users who can’t use the iPad Pros as a tablet. The displays feature 1920 x 1080 resolution with 99 percent sRGB coverage. The Wacom 13 touch also supports Wacom’s 10-finger multitouch gestures, which allow users to navigate using familiar hand movements like pinching and swiping. It is very similar to an iPad. The Wacom One S and M are the company’s first entry-level pen tablets with 4K pressure sensitivity and tilt support. A customized stylus ships with all four versions of the tablet and comes in various colors. 

https://www.wacom.com

AUTODESK AND HYPERTEC

Here are a few more announcements from the show. Autodesk opened their Autodesk Vision Presentation with the tagline “world builders welcome.” Hypertec was one of the companies powering the Autodesk show floor booth with robust liquid cooling workstation computers with powerful RTX cards by NVIDIA. Everyone said, “Go see the new liquid-cooled hardware.”

Hypertec’s Kronos W405T-G6 machines featured:

• AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5995WX 64 cores 
• Up to 2TB of DD4 3200MHz RAM,
• Up to 3 x NVIDIA Quadro RTX6000 cards, 
• 3x M.2 (PCIe x4/SATA), 2 x U.2 NVMe and 8 x SATA 
• High-performance liquid cooling system, 
• 1200W 80 PLUS Platinum certified power supply.

https://hypertec.com

https://www.autodesk.com

The Foundry

The Foundry attended SIGGRAPH, giving users the latest updates on their products. NeRF was another popular topic at SIGGRAPH NeRF, also known as neural radiance field, is a fully connected neural network that can generate novel views of complex 3D scenes. NeRF art generated by AI was a big hit with many attendees. An entire gallery was dedicated to NeRF works, including a party at the end of SIGGRAPH. 

The Foundry has long held the excellent 3D modeling tool Modo, and it is now up to version 16.1.

https://www.foundry.com

Pixar

Renderman was back with their User Group and new collectible teapot for the movie, “Elemental.” SIGGRAPH featured a Renderman Museum display for past Renderman teapots that attendees have collected over the years. 

https://www.pixar.com

AMD and Boris FX

AMD announced their Radeon Pro W7600 graphics cards designed to tackle workloads for AEC and media and entertainment. (see: Architosh, “AMD Intros two new high-performance Radeon PRO graphics cards,” 18 Aug 23). AMD’s Radeon Pro W7500 and W7600 are perfect for architects with a great price point for a mid-range graphics card. Boris FX is thrilled to partner with AMD for power users to create and render stunning visual effects with accelerated speed. AMD also sponsored the Renderman “Lost Things” Art Challenge. 

Wild Capture was at SIGGRAPH, talking with companies about their software. Wild Capture continues to pursue its vision of standardizing the digitization of human performance with tools that simplify the process. The company 4D Views announced the launch of their next-generation volumetric capture system, the HOLYSYS+. 

https://www.amd.com

SideFX and Maxon

SideFX did several presentations inside the meeting rooms focused on their new release of Solaris and other features. Maxon had a big booth on the show floor with many top presenters showing off the new updates to Maxon products. 

https://www.sidefx.com

https://www.maxon.net

Closing Remarks

Computer Graphics is changing exponentially at this moment. It is very important to consider the advancements in AI in all aspects of the pipeline, from the desktop to the server. 

Visualization is changing with a single format, including AI tools streamlining work and design to be faster and more efficient. It is said that NVIDIA has changed the Face of AI with its GPU. AEC is already seeing this change with Twinmotion, Unreal Engine, and Unity. 

Autodesk now provides a license of Twinmotion with a purchase of Revit. Digital Twins are changing the way big corporations are designing their factories, warehouses, and manufacturing plants. And they are a big part of the AEC/O industry at both the building, plant, and infrastructure levels. It is so much cheaper to find an error in a design phase, especially structural or engineering errors, in a Digital Twin than after you have built it. 

Apple will soon release the Vision Pro goggles, bringing the Mac universe into the metaverse. Can you imagine how this will change the way we work and socialize? If the Apple Vision Pro is a hit, this will accelerate the innovation and growth of the metaverse. USD (Universal Scene Description) format is here to stay. AI and ML will be everywhere if it isn’t already—this is not a fad, or something will fade away. It is the future of how we work, socialize, and create.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here on Architosh in the comments section below. 

The post SIGGRAPH 2023: It Starts with AI—The Full Report appeared first on Architosh.

The Hero Image

A word about the hero image above. It is a picture of the new NVIDIA H100 GPU, the successor GPU architecture to NVIDIA Ampere. Named after Grace Hopper, a pioneering US computer scientist, the new architecture delivers an order of magnitude of power over the Ampere architecture. Exciting things will be powered by the Hopper architecture, including complex digital twins (think large buildings, smart cities, and much more). Grace Hopper’s name is also used for the new ARM Neoverse-based Grace CPU and the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip, which combines two Grace CPUs.

These new silicon wonders will help power high-performance compute and AI workloads complimentary to NVIDIA Omniverse. Architosh will be writing about these new chips in its next Xpresso No 37 newsletter coming up soon. (sign-up here!).

Let’s now talk about Omniverse with Richard Kerris.

Richard Kerris Interview

(Akiko Ashley) Will NVIDIA use their technologies to help Climate Change to find solutions for the heat generated by their Data Centers into a renewable form of energy rather than just dissipating the heat with fans? Is it possible for AI to come up with a better solution?

(Richard Kerris) NVIDIA accelerated computing can meet data center demands at lower energy consumption than traditional methods, and NV powers 23 of the world’s 25 greenest supercomputers.

Our end-to-end AI supercomputing platform powered by NV Ampere architecture A100 GPUs is up to 40x more energy efficient than traditional CPU servers when running AI and HPC workloads. A hyperscale data center with NV GPUs and TensorRT takes up 1/47th the rack space of CPU-based systems that it replaces and runs at 95% less energy cost while running all AI models.

If all CPU servers running AI and HPC transitioned to GPUs, the world would save 11 TWh of electricity/yr, equal to two coal-fired power plants or 1.7m cars. We’re also committed to powering our own data center operations with more renewable energy. In FY21, 17 of our data centers were fully powered by renewable energy. Our goal is to match 100 percent of our global electricity use from sources like solar by 2025.

Q: In the world of Omniverse, USD will become what HTML is to the internet, how will end users who connect to Omniverse navigate through different worlds, will users have a standardized profile that has the software licenses of companies like Autodesk or Adobe, and automatically know if the user is a licensed user? How will Omniverse protect proprietary projects? How will it know which projects are for universal use and which are not? Will there be a standard set so users can connect in the same way? How do I go from work projects to playing Fortnite in Omniverse and then switch to Minecraft seamlessly?

At the very core of Omniverse is our base on Universal Scene Description (USD) originally developed by Pixar, but is now adopted across most industries. We think that USD can be thought of like HTML, which enabled the Internet to get to what we know today. HTML helped facilitate every experience on every website from every browser, every device was consistent, and we believe USD will help do the same thing for virtual worlds.

We need that same kind of plumbing so that every virtual world, no matter what kind of virtual world you’re going to, has a consistency of your experience. We believe, as do many other companies, that USD will be the core of that. The analogy is the HTML of these virtual worlds.

Omniverse is a platform that connects existing workflows and existing tools. The tools that you use don’t have to change with Omniverse, they get enhanced and extended by the platform.

MORE: Universal Scene Description (USD) File Support in Preview App on Mac Monterey

We are actively evangelizing USD support across all developer ecosystems—game development, design and content creation, AEC, manufacturing/industrial, and even robotics, and are seeing a lot of traction and commitment for support.

Q: How will copyrights, trademarks, data privacy, and proprietary data be dealt with within Omniverse?

Omniverse is not a place, it is a technology development platform for developers, enterprises to build and operate their own virtual worlds, and artists to connect their existing 3D tools.

At GTC22 NVIDIA announced the further expansion of the Omniverse ecosystem.

At NVIDIA, we take individual privacy very seriously and scrupulously comply with privacy principles across all our products.

Q: Will the role of CAD and Architectural Design expand in the Omniverse as builders of worlds?

Architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AEC/O) is one of the primary industries that can benefit from Omniverse, whether design teams connecting their existing 3D workflows with the collaboration aspects of the platform or operating future digital twins of buildings or cities in Omniverse running on NVIDIA OVX.

Q: What kind of government regulation will be some of the obstacles for Omniverse? For example, “Do Not Share My Data” laws in California. 

Any new regulation must be considered carefully in the context of the legal framework that already exists. NVIDIA abides by legal systems in the U.S. and Europe which provide a comprehensive framework that applies to all conduct.

Closing Notes

Architosh will have additional articles on GTC22 announcements, including features oriented at industrial applications for digital twins for AEC/O across architecture and infrastructure. So stay tuned at Architosh and join our Xpresso monthly newsletter to never miss a beat on our top stories, learn about emerging technologies (emTech) in CAD industries, plus gain early access to critical feature articles.

About Richard Kerris

Richard Kerris is the VP of Omniverse Development Platform at NVIDIA.  He is a member of the board of advisors for OTOY, and in the past held positions as principal, new product development at Amazon AWS, CMO at Avegant, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Lucas Film, and Senior Director at Apple. Richard has a deep history in the professional 3D software market with manager and director roles prior to Apple with Alias|Wavefront, Electric Image, Pixar, and Silicon Graphics (SGI). 

The post Omniverse In-Depth with Richard Kerris, VP NVIDIA appeared first on Architosh.

Omniverse is expanding with visualization contributing to the growth with 3D collaboration with artists and AI assistants for photo-real virtual worlds, plus the hybrid work environments for both home and work, and Omniverse & AI simulating virtual worlds enabling the creation of digital twins and the growing ecosystem of creatives, designers and engineers, digital assistants, avatars, and video conferencing.

Omniverse Updates

Virtual worlds are part of the evolution of AI. Omniverse, from creation to the operation of virtual worlds, uses 3D assets created by 3D artists and AI assistants to operate digital twins to connect robots. VP Richard Kerris is one of the driving forces behind Omniverse and creating partnerships that will help Omniverse grow exponentially.

Omniverse: Major updates include:

• Omniverse Kit 103
• Create 2022.1
• View 2022.1
• Nucleus
• Code
• Replicator
• Showroom
• Omniverse XR App

New hardware to support Omniverse was also announced at the GTC keynote.

NVIDIA RTX A5500

NVIDIA announced the RTX A5500 Desktop GPU which is a more powerful cousin to the A5000. The new GPU is available now. The specs include:

• 24 GB GDDR6 w/ ECC graphics memory
• 4x DP 1.4 Display Outputs
• Support for up to 2 8K displays
• NVIDIA NVLink
• Quadro Sync II
• PCIe-Gen4
• NVIDIA Virtual Workstation (vWS)

The NVIDIA RTX A5500 is built for demanding multi-application workflows and will be available in new workstation computers, such as those announced last week by BOXX Technologies in the United States. (see: Architosh, “New BOXX Workstations To Feature New NVIDIA RTX GPUs,” 25 Mar 2022).

NVIDIA’s newest RTX A5500 is optimized for multi-app workflows. It features up to 24 GB of DDR6 memory.

“My team can handle larger CAD and CAE datasets and critically, we can interact with and iterate these larger datasets simultaneously by making use of the extra GPU memory and computing capabilities of the NVIDIA RTX A5500,” said Brian Rotty Senior Engineer, M4 Aerospace Engineering.

NVIDIA announced NVIDIA RTX Laptop GPU’s including NVIDIA RTX A5500, A4500, A3000 12 GB, A2000 8GB, and NVIDIA RTX A1000. NVIDIA’s RTX technology is now available across all segments. These GPUs are AI optimized with 4th generation NVIDIA Max-Q Technology, with up to two times faster than the previous generation, with access to NVIDIA Omniverse, Cloud XR, NGC, and more. Availability coming in spring 2022. The company’s flagship model is now the NVIDIA RTX A5500 with 16GB of memory and has double the rendering performance of the previous RTX 5000.

NVIDIA announced NVIDIA OVX, a data central scale Omniverse computing system for Industrial Digital Twins. OVX is the first Omniverse computing system with 8 NVIDIA A40 GPUs, 3 NVIDIA Connect X-6 Dx NICs, 2 Intel Xeon Platinum 8362, 16 TB NVMe, NVIDIA certified.

NVIDIA also announced new RTX GPUs for mobile laptops, including thinner chassis models with powerful workstation graphics capabilities.

These new workstation-level laptop GPUs should be appearing in available systems shortly, such as the BOXX Technologies systems we wrote about last week. (see: Architosh, “New BOXX Workstations To Feature New NVIDIA RTX GPUs,” 25 March 2022)

The Omniverse

The Omniverse Ecosystem expanse is now ten times larger in all aspects including digital twins and robotics with a key announcement from Bentley Systems of LumenRT powered by iTwin for Omniverse. Bentley LumenRT provides simple visualization workflows by linking directly to a single infrastructure digital twin powered by iTwin and quickly creates 4D visualizations of assemblies or individual parts of the underlying digital twin model with AI-enhanced lighting and environmental effects.

LumenRT powered by iTwins is available now in Omniverse. Other companies available in Omniverse include ESRI, Siemens Energy, Trimble, Graphisoft, Autodesk, Maxon, Rhinoceros. SideFX and Adobe, and many more.

At GTC22 NVIDIA announced the further expansion of the Omniverse Ecosystem. Key AEC companies include Autodesk, Bentley, Graphisoft, Maxon, Esri, Trimble, and McNeel’s Rhino.

The value of Omniverse Digital Twins allows factory planners to work inside the digital twin of the real plants to design production flow and work out the bugs before implementing it in the real world. Software engineers can test a “software build” on the digital twin of a self-driving car to see how it performs before releasing it into the fleet.

Isaac for AMR announced it is now included in Omniverse with Isaac GEMs, Isaac Sim, Replicator, CuOpt, DeepMap, and Metropolis.

Omniverse Avatar is an intelligent avatar useful for live customer support, web customer support, video conferencing telepresence, robots, and virtual worlds. GTC keynote demonstrated Toy Jensen responding to questions with real Jensen. Imagine an intelligent avatar helping you with a building design in 3D or helping you in your car with directions.

Key industrial applications for NVIDIA Omniverse include the following: Product design, factories, cities (including building and infrastructure design), and earth sciences.

New Omniverse connections recently released include Adobe Substance 3D Designer, Substance Materials, PTC Creo, Unreal Engine, and new USD support for Maxon 4D. Omniverse includes 26 new CAD USD Converters (including LumenRT by Bentley for NVIDIA Omniverse powered by iTwin by Bentley Systems), and Asset Libraries located in the Asset Browser like actor core, Sketchfab, and Turbosquid and the new Omniverse Ready Assets in twinbru by A23D.

Omniverse Enterprise is now on Launchpad allowing companies to try Omniverse without a huge investment in hardware.

Omniverse Cloud—Mac Support

Omniverse Cloud is an exciting announcement that provides one-click design collaboration, uniting designers in shared scenes no matter what their hardware is. Mac Users can use Omniverse Cloud. Omniverse Cloud is OS neutral and hardware neutral.

The services available inside the Omniverse Cloud include Nucleus Cloud, a simple one-click-to-collaborate sharing tool that gives artists access to edit large 3D scenes from anywhere from any device. Omniverse Create is an app for technical designers, artists, and creatives to interactively build 3D assets in worlds in real-time while the View app for non-technical users allows clients to view Omniverse scenes streaming full simulation and rendering capabilities using the GeForce NOW platform powered by NVIDIA RTX GPU’s in the cloud. Mac users have access to GeForce NOW.

Jensen Huang is CEO of NVIDIA and led the GTC22 keynote address.

The full Omniverse Cloud collection of services is under development. Nucleus Cloud for one-click simple sharing is accepting applications for early access.

In the keynote, Jenson Huang showed off a demo of human design architects and one specialist Omniverse Avatar collaborating in real-time virtually in the Omniverse Cloud making changes to an architectural project. The team spoke to each other using a standard web conference tool while connected to a scene hosted in Nucleus and two of the clients streamed Omniverse View from GeForce NOW to their laptops and tablet.

“At KPF, a global leader in architectural design, we value the ability of our designers to collaborate as seamlessly as possible by making cloud-first technologies available to them when they need it,” said Cobus Bothma, director of Applied Research at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. “Omniverse Cloud fits perfectly into that practice with the promise of excelling our visual and 3D design collaboration abilities by enabling our teams to work in Omniverse from any device, anywhere.”

Global leaders building in Omniverse include Double Negative in the UK, Lowe’s, Siemens Gamasa, Kroger, and Amazon Robotics.

Other GTC22 Announcements

Other announcements from NVIDIA at the GTC Keynote include:

• Hopper Architecture, the successor to Ampere architecture.
• DGX H100
• Grace ARM-based CPU Superchip
• NVIDIA AI for speech, recommender system, hyperscale inference
• NVLink Custom Silicon Integration
• CUDA-X Libraries — updates
• Jestson AGX Orin
• Drive Orin, DRIVE Hyperion

Final Analysis

Omniverse is an incredible, versatile, multi-connected virtual world but there are questions about Omniverse I still have as a creative and end-user. Will Omniverse have a standard for entering these virtual worlds? If USD is the HTML of the Metaverse, how will we navigate in the virtual world without a URL address? What if I want to create a world in Omniverse, how does that work?

NVIDIA’s new Grace CPU is a custom ARM-based chip and was announced at GTC22. Despite the fact that NVIDIA gave up its acquisition of ARM Limited of the UK, currently owned by SoftBank of Japan, NVIDIA’s Grace CPU marks a clear vector of interest in creating specialized and general ARM-based semiconductors (chips) for a multitude of needs. Architosh will be taking a deep dive into the Grace CPU in another article.

How will software licenses work in Omniverse? How do I navigate from work in Omniverse to playing Fortnite or switch to Minecraft seamlessly? How do I protect proprietary work under non-disclosure in Omniverse and limit who has access to it?  How will these virtual worlds connect safely? How will privacy, copyrights, trademarks, and proprietary information be protected? How will government regulation of data be implemented in Omniverse policies, for example, the “Do not sell my data” law in California?

There are many questions lingering about NVIDIA’s Omniverse that I want to be answered. I will be looking to get some of these answers soon in a part 2 report. 

For more information, please go to http://www.nividia.com.

The post NVIDIA GTC 22 — Announcements and Omniverse Advances appeared first on Architosh.

Technologies like Omniverse Avatar and Omniverse Replicator will make working in the Omniverse a powerful tool for interacting with AI and building digital twins. All of this is driven by the effective use of RTX. 

Richard and Andrew give us insight into how professionals in AEC will use these technologies for both collaborative work and visualization. Designing projects will have a new set of powerful tools to create what is in your imagination in real-time.  

The Interview

(Akiko Ashley) Hello Richard, would you mind telling us about your experience in creative development with technology and how you found your way to NVIDIA?

My career spans Alias Wavefront, Apple, and Lucasfilm, which combined driving marketing and product development to bring new ideas to life. During all that time, I was a customer and a fan of NVIDIA; in fact, I presented at the first GTC while I was at Lucasfilm. It was just a matter of time until I found my home here. 

Hello Andrew, can you tell us about yourself and your role at NVIDIA?

I lead industry marketing strategy at NVIDIA for AEC, based at our HQ in Silicon Valley. Part of my role is staying on top of industry trends, particularly on the technology side. I’m in my ninth year at NVIDIA; there have been some tremendous advances in technology in that time that have delivered benefits to companies all over the world. 

As a side note, I’ve traveled to more than 80 countries, which has given me a global perspective on the challenges companies face, and that’s proved helpful for exploring how leading-edge technology can help enterprises transform their approach to business.

Richard, can you tell us about Omniverse and how this technology will connect architects and other professionals working together and increase their ability to collaborate in real-time?

NVIDIA Omniverse makes it possible for designers, artists, and reviewers to work together in real-time across leading software applications in a shared virtual world from anywhere. 

MORE: NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang Dazzles with Key Announcements and New Tools for Omniverse

Architects can meet virtually in a building they are working on. For example, a team could meet on the 36 floor—walk around the entire floor and iterate on texture details. They can also simulate what it would look like during different times of the day or how the light will reflect on the outside of the building before they have to build it in the physical world.

Andrew, can you tell us about NVIDIA RTX technology and how it has changed in the past two years?

NVIDIA RTX technology truly was a giant leap forward in compute and graphics acceleration with a fusion of raytracing, deep learning, and advanced shading. 

Bentley Systems is a globally leading AEC industry software company that has recently announced it is partnering with NVIDIA to bring Omniverse technology to its building and infrastructure design applications.

With NVIDIA’s invention of RT Cores (dedicated hardware on the GPU for raytracing) and Tensor Cores (for hardware-accelerated deep learning inference), not only did we achieve a massive boost in GPU performance with RTX for various professional workloads, but for the first time, we could achieve real-time raytracing. This meant users could interactively render massive scenes at cinema-quality, which, of course, is a phenomenal boost for visualization workflows for creative professionals. 

In the past two years, the NVIDIA GPU microarchitecture moved up from the Turing generation, which introduced RTX technology, to the Ampere generation. NVIDIA announced this latest GPU architecture in 2020, and it features next-generation RT Cores and Tensor Cores and doubles the GPU memory for our professional GPUs. These second-generation RT Cores and third-generation Tensor Cores offer users unprecedented graphics, rendering, and AI performance. 

We recently announced the NVIDIA RTX A2000 desktop GPU, making RTX technology more accessible from a price perspective for millions of designers and architects.

Richard, can you tell us how Omniverse will bring various aspects of NVIDIA technology together in one place?

Omniverse is the culmination of over 20 years of NVIDIA technology, bringing together real-time ray tracing, AI, DL, ML with PhysX engine, DLSS, etc.

Omniverse Enterprise runs on certified Omniverse RTX/workstation configurations. 

Richard, can you explain the role of USD in Omniverse?

Pixar’s open-source Universal Scene Description is the foundation of Omniverse. It enables large teams to work simultaneously across multiple software applications on a shared 3D scene. This open standard foundation gives software partners multiple ways to extend and connect to Omniverse, whether through USD adoption and support, building a plugin, or via an Omniverse Connector.

Richard, can you talk about the Physics extension developed by Apple, NVIDIA, and Pixar and how it works?

Apple, Pixar, and NVIDIA have collaborated to bring advanced physics capabilities to USD, embracing open standards to provide 3D workflows to billions of devices. 

NVIDIA recently brought its RTX technology to its Ampere-architecture-based A2000 desktop GPU, making RTX technology more accessible from a price perspective for millions of designers and architects.

Rigid body dynamics is the first part of this, and there’s more to go. The important thing is that companies are working together on this critical initiative. In much the same way HTML unified the web experience, we believe that USD will do so for 3D virtual worlds. 

Richard, do you need RTX GPU to use Omniverse, and does Omniverse support first-generation RTX GPU’s? Do CPU cores matter with Omniverse?

Yes, you need an RTX-based machine to use Omniverse. That is correct. Optimally, it will be a better experience to use a GPU card with a good amount of memory. 

Andrew, can you talk about accelerated raytracing using RTX and how it works, and how it will develop in the future?

Raytracing is massively computationally intensive since it calculates the color of the pixels you see on your computer display by tracing the path that light would take if it were to travel from your eye throughout the scene you’re viewing. 

For example, in a raytraced visualization of a building interior with physically based materials and lighting, the GPU calculates how natural and artificial light is reflected off objects such as polished marble tiles or refracted by passing through glass, or how the light gets blocked by objects and causes shadows. The benefit is that what you see on your display is exactly how that building interior will appear in real life under various lighting conditions.

Until the introduction of NVIDIA RTX technology, this computationally expensive type of photorealistic rendering would take a long time. 

Depending on the complexity of your scene, it could take several hours to render an image when using CPUs. With NVIDIA RTX, the combination of RT Cores, Tensor Cores, and CUDA Cores accelerate raytracing calculations to such an extent that rendering becomes real-time. 

The Tensor Cores speed up AI-augmented applications such as NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and rendering denoising. NVIDIA’s AI-accelerated denoiser was trained using tens of thousands of images, enabling it to make an intelligent prediction on what each pixel in the render should look like. This means designers can pan, zoom, and rotate their model and instantly view the render from that new perspective without having to wait a few minutes (or longer) for the image to resolve. 

Twinmotion by Epic Games is RTX hardware-accelerated for real-time raytracing rendering. Tensor Cores speed up AI-accelerated denoiser algorithms to improve rendering image quality, all in real-time. (Image: screenshot from AEC industry session at GTC 21, Belinda Ercan, Twinmotion, Epic Games)

So now, design teams can quickly iterate on models using raytraced renderings with full global illumination for animations such as architectural walkthroughs.

In the future, we can envision raytracing being used much more widely than just for visualizing 3D models of buildings and products on computer displays. For example, raytraced virtual reality environments could make scenes indistinguishable from real life for an even more immersive experience. 

Andrew, what is CUDA’s role in RTX?

As a bit of background, NVIDIA introduced the CUDA programming model in 2006, which opened the door to using the parallel processing capabilities of the GPU for general-purpose computing. Today, CUDA is the most powerful software development platform for building GPU-accelerated applications. 

CUDA Cores are parallel processors that handle all the data fed into and out of the GPU. NVIDIA RTX GPUs have thousands of CUDA Cores (the ultra-high-end NVIDIA RTX A6000 has 10,752 CUDA Cores), which rapidly process the innumerable calculations required for fast, accurate raytracing and real-time engineering simulation, as well as boosting frame rates. So, CUDA Cores are a critical element for improving RTX GPU performance with the many design and visualization software products used in AEC.

Andrew, can you outline a roadmap for RTX & RTX GPU graphics cards in the future?

I’ve been with NVIDIA since the Kepler generation of GPU microarchitecture (five generations before the current Ampere architecture), and each new generation has delivered impressive advances in GPU technology. While I can’t share specifics on our future GPU roadmap, it’s reasonable to assume NVIDIA GPUs and drivers will continue to deliver industry-leading performance and reliability with each new generation. 

Richard, how will Omniverse influence NVIDIA’s RTX technology development?

Omniverse is based on our RTX hardware for real-time raytracing, photorealistic imagery, and more. It’s built on over 20 years of NVIDIA technology. We built this platform because we use it ourselves to simulate everything that is built. We also run visualizations of the things that we are going to develop. All teams at NVIDIA work and learn together. 

Richard, can you talk about how NVIDIA’s GPU technology for raytracing acceleration works with Omniverse, and what results can we expect?

The industry breakthrough of real-time raytracing made possible with RTX is truly a game-changer. Photorealistic real-time rendering means true to reality simulations and workflows. You can expect digital twin virtual worlds identical to the physical ones, better productions being done in real-time, and much more. This is the most significant change in computer graphics history, and we’re just getting started with this new platform.

Richard, can you tell us how audio works in Omniverse? 

Several companies are exploring how to implement audio using Omniverse. We have basic support but are also exploring these areas with partners and developers. More to come on this topic. 

Richard, can you give a simple explanation of the first steps of how a first-time user can use Omniverse and become familiar with it? 

Anyone can download Omniverse in open beta if you are using an NVIDIA RTX. We have over 150 tutorials online to help you learn how to use it. The community has been great as well, customers helping customers. 

A large customer in Asia is creating digital twins of their hospitals using RTX-powered Unreal Engine technology. (Image: screenshot from AEC industry session at GTC 21, Belinda Ercan, Twinmotion, Epic Games)

Omniverse is a complex software platform capable of many things. The best bet for customers is to bring their existing workflows to Omniverse and extend them. 3D creators and designers have seen immediate success when connecting their core apps to the platform and taking advantage of all the new capabilities Omniverse brings to them. 

Omniverse Enterprise is more complex and is designed for multiple team members. Ideally, the facility (or firm) has development support and an experienced IT department to deploy the platform successfully. 

Richard, how do you see architectural visualization harnessing the power of NVIDIA technology in the Omniverse? 

AEC visualization is a key market for Omniverse because of true-to-reality simulation. We work with our software partners to extend and enhance their customers’ workflows, which allow them to utilize real-time simulations to aid in their visualizations.  

Andrew, what is the role of RTX in Architectural Visualization?

With NVIDIA RTX-powered desktop and mobile workstations or a virtual machine running NVIDIA RTX vWS (virtual Workstation) software, design teams can instantly view physically accurate and predictable visualizations of how building interiors/exteriors will appear in real life. 

An example of real-time raytracing powered by RTX technology inside Twinmotion. HKS is an architectural practice already working with NVIDIA on exploring Omniverse technology for their workflows. (Image: screenshot from AEC industry session at GTC 21, Belinda Ercan, Twinmotion, Epic Games).

By enabling real-time ray-traced rendering, RTX helps designers remain in the creative flow as they iterate on design options. They can quickly consider various options to create the most compelling renders faster. The accuracy and realism offered by RTX rendering with physically based materials and lighting help drive better and faster decision-making so that teams can keep projects on track under tight deadlines. 

NVIDIA Omniverse provides a virtual collaboration and simulation platform for teams working on a conceptual design to collaborate in real-time on a common model and take advantage of the RTX Renderer to create beautiful renders for design reviews and competition/bid submissions.

RTX-powered mobile workstations and RTX vWS software enable users to be productive from wherever they are working with their advanced visualization tools. The larger GPU memory in NVIDIA RTX professional GPUs provides the capacity to work with massive, complex architectural models and scenes.

Richard, can you name any architectural firms that are testing Omniverse?

We work with several architectural firms like Foster + Partners, HKS, and KPF. Many others around the globe. We featured a few in our recent GTC events (spring & fall) and will continue to highlight the amazing work they’re doing. 

Andrew, what architectural, CAD or engineering software takes advantage of RTX?

There are over 40 RTX-enabled software products, including Blender, Chaos V-Ray, Enscape, Unreal Engine. You can see a complete list here. 

Andrew, what would you say is the most significant role RTX will play in the Metaverse?

Not sure I can narrow it down to just a single significant point, but for example, RTX technology could help make the Metaverse more realistic from a visual and physics-based perspective. 

With real-time raytracing, we could achieve photorealistic, dynamic digital twins of everything in the Metaverse, so we’d have realistic avatar simulation and an accurate digitally built environment that respects the laws of physics.

Richard, what is your favorite thing about Omniverse, and what would you like to see happen in Omniverse?

My favorite thing about Omniverse is team building; we have some of the most innovative developers and creators from across the globe, most with a strong history in production, toolmaking, and breakthrough technologies. They have come together to build this platform, along with our software partners, and it’s revolutionizing multiple industries. These are the days we will all look back in 20 years and see it as a moment that changed computer graphics for everyone. 

Thank you, Richard and Andrew, for answering these questions and helping us to understand both Omniverse and RTX. 

Additional Notes

Omniverse Enterprise was released during GTC, and with this release, companies can collaborate with teams in different locations in one place. RTX is a growing technology becoming faster, more precise, and powerful with each generation. It should be noted that both are only available on Windows and Linux. I hope we see Omniverse on the Mac soon, and perhaps RTX.

An open beta for Omniverse is available here. https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-omniverse-platform

Image Credits

Format equates to “party with copyright” / “party with reserved rights of use.” (eg: image: Epic Games, Inc. / Architosh. All rights reserved.) 

Title image credit: screenshot from Belinda Ercan’s GTC 21 session A31745 showcasing NVIDIA’s real-time raytracing technology powered by RTX inside of Epic’s Twinmotion visualization software.  ( © Epic Games, Inc. / Architosh. All rights reserved.) Non-credited images are copyrighted to Architosh. All other images are copyrighted, as noted in the image credits. 

The post NVIDIA Execs Talk Omniverse and RTX with Architosh appeared first on Architosh.

AI and Simulation

First off, Omniverse, NVIDIA’s simulation for creating and connecting virtual worlds, is becoming more powerful with new tools, including Omniverse Avatar, for creating digital avatars with embodied AI’s in the virtual world. The Omniverse Avatar platform allows companies to create avatars that people can interact with. This uses NVIDIA’s speech AI, computer vision, understanding of language cues with recommendations, and realistic simulation technologies. 

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is represented here in his AI avatar answering complex questions.

A demonstration of a toy version of CEO Jensen Huang (part of Project Tokkio) being asked complicated questions using words and included the natural movement of the body and hand gestures people do when they communicate, creating a very natural looking avatar. 

Those watching the keynote were treated to a demonstration of Project Tokkio technology, wherein a toy version of CEO Jensen Huang was being asked complicated questions using words. A natural-looking avatar (“toy me” of Huang) answered using natural body movements and hand gestures typically used by real humans. 

Omniverse

Project Tokkio is a customer service kiosk with an Omniverse Maxine-powered AI talking to customers. Omniverse Replicator is a synthetic data engine that will help businesses create more accurate digital twins creating better AI tools for our world. 

What the Omniverse looks like diagrammatically. Omniverse connects physical worlds and their data and systems with applications and their data and even other Omniverse worlds.

Omniverse Replicator has two applications. NVIDIA Drive Sim gives us a digital twin of vehicles to see how they drive in the virtual world before putting them on the road. NVIDIA Isaac Sim creates a digital twin of manipulating robots. Replicator allows companies to use this technology to learn “effective” skills in the virtual environment before being used in the real world for production or any situation. 

Architects deal with many-layered complexities in creating and designing. A digital twin of a project could help solve engineering, structural, and manufacturing obstacles early in the design stage. The client can view the project in real-time and watch the progress and actively participate in the process. You can develop a virtual twin to test the limitations of a design. You can see the pitfalls before you have built something and create changes in real-time. 

New NVIDIA Omniverse technologies or apps include Showroom, Farm, AR, and VR. These are all in beta except VR which will feature the first RTX accelerated real-time raytracing technology inside a headset.

Imagine the possibilities of Omniverse with real-time collaboration across multiple artists with the ability to access talent across the world. It gives architects flexibility without the worry of expanding their office space. 

Omniverse has new features, including Showroom, Farm, AR, and VR. 

Omniverse in Industry

Omniverse launched in December 2020 and has been downloaded by 70,000 people. Professionals at 700 companies are using Omniverse including gaming, CAD, medical imaging, autonomous vehicle developers, and creatives in Film & Television. 

Omniverse Enterprise is available on November 9th. It allows design teams working across different software packages using the USD format to collaborate in real-time, in a shared virtual space on any device with access to global teams around the world. Huang said during his keynote that “Omniverse will revolutionize how the 43 million designers in the world collaborate.” 

NVIDIA’s Omniverse has been popular with the industry, with thousands of companies already testing it and putting it to work.

A few Fortune 500 companies and global design leaders demonstrated their use of Omniverse including HKS Architects, KPF Architects, Ericsson, Lockheed Martin, CannonDesign, Epigraph, and Sony Pictures Animation.

CannonDesign is a global architecture, engineering, and consulting firm using Omniverse Enterprise to speed up collaborative design. Sony Pictures is using Omniverse Enterprise to enable multiple artists to work on a single scene together in real-time. Ericsson is a leading telecommunications company using the Omniverse platform to create digital twins of cities to simulate and visualize signal propagation to accelerate feature development and insights into their 5G networks.

NVIDIA Omniverse will allow designers working around the globe to collaborate on 3D scenes together in real-time, each working in their own preferred software tools around their own specialization or area of interest. Noted architectural firms like KPF, HKS, and CannonDesign have all embraced Omniverse technology and are trialing solution workflows.

Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, announced the availability of Bentley iTwin for NVIDIA Omniverse which can enable next-generation physically accurate 4D visualization and construction simulation of infrastructure digital twins for the global infrastructure engineering industry. 

Bentley iTwin will allow companies to explore and visualize massive infrastructure in a virtual world like they are walking through it in real-time. Ersi, a leading urban design mapping software, is bringing Omniverse into the Ersi ArcGIS City Engine application connecting millions of ArcGIS ecosystem users to the Omniverse platform. Teams can apply full 3D city models and geographic content with photorealism, giving companies and end-users the ability to create digital twins in the virtual worlds of Omniverse. 

USD at the center Omniverse

USD (Universal Scene Description) is a file format and is at the heart of Omniverse. USD was invented at Pixar and the current USD format is roughly the fourth generation of Pixar’s “composed scene description” technology.

In August of this year, Apple, NVIDIA, and Pixar joined forces to expand USD to perform physics in the Omniverse in a consistent way as the real world. In other words, simulations obey the laws of physics. Even more important, the joint work by NVIDIA, Apple, and Pixar enable the new physics extensions for USD to be flexible letting developers select which solvers to work with but all driven by the same data set of USD. Gamers prioritize speed over accuracy while architects and engineers prioritize accuracy over speed. 

Bentley has announced its integrations with NVIDIA Omniverse with its iTwins digital twins’ technology.

Omniverse uses USD (Universal Scene Description) to create the assets inside the virtual world across many leading applications. Software companies supporting USD include Graphisoft, Autodesk, Unreal Engine, Adobe, and many more. “USD is the HTML of 3D,” stated Richard Kerris, VP of NVIDIA Omniverse. In the keynote, NVIDIA CEO Huang stated that there are 14 connectors that link apps together through Omniverse and 15 more are under development.

BMW is using NVIDIA Omniverse to build digital twins of factories and digital twin robots and humans and to simulate new factory designs in Omniverse before commencing with physical designs. This enables them to test out scenarios and optimize factory conditions.

NVIDIA made the announcement that there are four new features coming to Omniverse—Showroom, Farm, AR, and VR. All of them are in beta now except VR. 

Omniverse is set to transform the way designers and creatives work together around the globe while enabling each designer to bring to bear on common projects their specialized skills, knowledge, and their preferred software tools, while they jointly and in real-time work on projects together literally within the same 3D environments (scenes). 

next page:  NVIDIA Quantum-2 Supercomputer, CUDA-X, Modulus, and Summary

The post NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang Dazzles with Key Announcements and New Tools for Omniverse appeared first on Architosh.

Autodesk

Autodesk hosted the SIGGRAPH 2021 Vision Series, discussing how productions are pushing the boundaries to create new options for film and television for artists. Programs like “Reimaging VFX Production in the Cloud” and “Marvel Studios: Adapting to Our New (Virtual) Normal” address cloud remote working with artists. Plus, the pipelines they use enable artists to work inside their pipelines via the cloud. Weta Digital CEO Prem Akkaraju spoke about the collaboration between Autodesk and WetaM using cloud production to give artists access to tools created by Weta via the cloud for a monthly price.

Legendary Weta Digital proprietary tools are coming to Autodesk Maya in via WetaM.

Autodesk held discussions about the new release of Maya 2022, 3DS Max 2022, Flame 2022, Bi Frost, Arnold, ShoGrid (formerly Shotgun). Maya 2022 and 3DS MAX 2022 now seamlessly integrate USD enabling you to load and edit large data sets at lightning speed and work directly with data using native tools. Both Maya and 3DS MAX have significant updates to their toolsets and the Arnold rendering tools.

UNITY

Unity did the sessions “The Journey to Real-Time Filmmaking” and “Digital Creation in the Physical World.” The panels talked about the use of Unity for real-time virtual production—how designers can use real-world technologies to merge their work with reality. Unity is used in virtual production on “The Umbrella Academy” for previsualization. Artists were able to use Unity to do real-time modifications to fit the needs of the show.

SIDE EFFECTS HOUDINI

Side Effects hosted Houdini Hive with several exhibitor presentations, including “Firehawk PDG Tools: Orchestrating VFX assets at scale.”

As most of the companies mentioned in our report, Houdini HIVE Siggraph sessions are viewable on their webpage (see link above).

Firehawk PDG Tools is a Houdini package for production. Orchestrating many versioned assets across shots with minimal resources, reproducing output: immutability and idempotence, integration with assets databases, and multiple schedulers. It allows an artist to use fewer resources to get the job done. Artists can get ten times more work done with Firehawk PDG tools.

Next, the presentation “Building an Artist Friendly CFX Pipeline” describes the journey of developing a CFX pipeline from scratch leveraging Vellum, PDG, and USD in Houdini. (see image above and below) The focus of this presentation was to cover core concepts and their implementation for the experienced and newcomers.

CFX pipeline creates a unified pipeline where artists don’t have to learn new tools and can use the same tools from package to package. CFX pipelines have reusability for setups and solvers. CFX pipelines must be rigid and flexible. Next, the session “Why Do I Keep Coming Back to Houdini?” was humorous and interesting. Alex Veaux from Tendril showed off a host of fractal-type visual effects in “Sneaky.” Alex uses Houdini to create his projects because of the flexibility and ease of delivering complex results for his animation characters.

A screenshot from one of the Houdini HIVI sessions at Siggraph 2021.

The presentation “Worldbuilding with USD at Ingenuity Studios” is a case study on various levels in using USD. They discuss how their pipeline must work for all projects, work quickly, stay organized, and work simultaneously across departments. USD helps achieve this with support for Alembic with materials referencing, supports, rigs, volumes, supercharged instancing, and super-fast, super light. Why USD?

USD delivers an instant asset system, one format for everything, across applications. It supports assets of all sizes and promotes the reuse of assets.

Adobe Substance 3D

Adobe announced at SIGGRAPH that Adobe joins NVIDIA in the Omniverse with the Substance Designer Suite of tools. Adobe Substance recently changed its subscription for Allegorithmic customers. It is almost twice the price point of the previous version from Allegorithmic. Still, they are adding features to make it easier to use Substance 3D across all applications and integrating USD into their applications.

Adobe Substance 3D Designer creates seamless materials and patterns, image filters, environment lights, or 3D models. Each asset can output infinite variations, and software is an industry-standard for material authoring.

Substance has recently become Adobe Substance 3D. Adobe too is active in the NVIDIA Omniverse technology platform.

Adobe Substance adds a new software application in Adobe Substance 3D Modeler in Beta. Substance 3D Modeler interprets spatial input from the physical world, allowing you to sculpt your model as you would in the actual world. You can use the natural, fluid gestures of the creative workflow; you can switch between desktop and VR. Modeler adapts to whatever you are doing. Adobe Substance 3D Modeler is a great software that can work at every stage of your project, conceptualizing, sketching, prototyping, blocking out game levels, and crafting complex characters or props. You can sculpt an entire scene. Adobe claims it frees you from technical constraints because it “works as an artist does.”

UNIGINE

UNIGINE Sim uses a 64-bit precision of coordinates enabling the simulation of 2^32 (4,294,967, 296 more) larger scenes, allowing for work on the planet-scale (up to the size of the Solar system).

Unigine 2.14 is the latest release of this real-time 3D engine for industrial-grade enterprise applications used in industries like Aerospace, Maritime, Defense, Automotive simulation, Oil and Gas, and Urban Planning.

Moreover, UNIGINE Sim incorporates a set of features that are important for city visualization in 3D: GIS data formats, geocoordinate support, a set of tools to work with both georeferenced and geotypical content, performance-optimized object cluster systems, and more.

UNIGINE Sim 2.14 features:

• Realistic Graphics
• Multi-Channel Image Generation
• Broad Spectrum of Hardware
• 64-bit precision of coordinates
• Visual scene editor, support for geo-coordinates
• Support for CIGI/HLA/DIS Protocols
• Embedded into C++/ C# apps (unlike many game engines)

UNIGINE is primarily used in simulation and training, and AI learning. Industries that use UNIGINE are Aerospace, Maritime, Ground Vehicle sims, Defense, Mining, Oil & Gas, and Urban Planning.

For those who recall Architosh GPU performance testing, UNIGINE is also the developer of the Valley and Heaven graphics performance benchmark tools. We hope these tools get updated soon for the M1 (ARM architecture) chips that are being deployed throughout Apple’s Mac range but also numerous PC makers.

Intel

Intel showed off their High-Fidelity Visualization applications that can quickly render massive amounts of raw data. “Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit” enables developers and content creators to build high-performance, high fidelity, extensible, and cost-efficient visualization applications.

Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit is a set of advanced, open-sourced libraries that deliver high performance, scalable, interactive raytracing, and OpenGL image quality for data-intensive cases on CPU platform visualization. ”

See a range of applications for the Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit in this short video presentation. 

Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit consists of:

• Intel Embree
• Intel OSPray
• Intel Open Image Denoise
• Intel Open Volume Kernel Library
• Intel OpenSWR

Readers can also learn a bit more about oneAPI Rendering Toolkit by watching this video presentation here or above

On the next page:  Dell, Qualcomm, Qualisys, and Hypertec, and AMD

The post SIGGRAPH 2021 — Year of the Metaverse, and Virtual and Global Production (Part 2) appeared first on Architosh.

It was good to see vendors like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook participate in sessions to add their expertise along with motion picture and visual effects professionals as content pipelines are changing. Autodesk still hosts its Vision series of presentations. Side Effects returns to do their Hive presentations and classes to illustrate features in Houdini.

Metaverse, virtual production, and the cloud are discussed a lot in presentations. We have a lot to cover so this year Architosh’s Siggraph virtual show floor coverage comes in Part 1 and Part 2—plus other news and special reports—from this day into next week. Be sure to stop by Architosh frequently to catch our latest in-depth information.

The Metaverse

The Metaverse was initially conceived as a dystopian future where virtual universes provided an escape from the dark, dreary worlds of crumbling societies. The word “metaverse” was first used in the 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash.  Hiro Protagonist, a hacker and pizza delivery guy, uses the Metaverse to escape his life in the book. He lives in a virtual world inside a 20 by 30-foot storage container in a world with a government corrupted by corporations. You ask, how does this affect me as an architect working in CAD?

Modern tech companies have devoted a ton of financial resources in creating and investing in the future of the Metaverse. NVIDIA had a video demonstrating Omniverse with four artists working together in their “Architecture Demo with Live Sync on Omniverse.” In this demo, NVIDIA had four artists connect in the Omniverse by the Nucleus Server. The four artists were using Revit, 3DS Max, Substance Painter, and Omniverse View. The four artists worked simultaneously together on the same project at the same time. All done interactively in real-time using NVIDIA’s RTX technology without ever having to do a test render.

In this video about the making of the NVIDIA GTC keynote one gets a good overall look at what at the chipmaker’s process. We have more videos below from them (and images too!)

NVIDIA, Epic Games, Autodesk had sessions discussing the Metaverse and how it would change the way we connect in our lives, not just for fun but also for working together. Advocates for the Metaverse see the implication of a growing digital economy on the web and the ever-increasing benefits for how humans interact using technology. Companies also expressed concerns about how the Metaverse could be abused by people like the issues on social media. A couple of sessions discussed the need to set standards so that the software to create these digital worlds could work seamlessly without interruption to the user.

In a call with analysts, CEO Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook discussed his company’s quarterly results while putting much of the focus on “The Metaverse.” He explained his vision of Facebook turning into a Metaverse Company. A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said his company is building an “enterprise metaverse.” In April, Epic Games announced a billion-dollar funding round to support its metaverse ambitions, pushing the Fortnite maker’s valuation to nearly $30 billion. People are already connected to metaverses in games like Fortnite and Roblox. Architectural firms use Omniverse and Unreal Engine in real-time scenarios working on large-scale projects with teams from other locations.

Global Production

Global Production kicked into high gear with the pandemic. The shift to the cloud will stay with us as cloud solutions increase with remote working. Companies want to have access to more creative talent worldwide through remote working expanding their talent pool. AWS delivers cloud solutions that allow artists in different locations to connect via the cloud to a single pipeline. Software developers created applications accessed through the cloud creating solutions without having to install anything on your workstation. Rendering and storage were some of the first things to migrate to the cloud.

Netflix has 36 productions using global production technologies to enable access to more creatives around the world. Cloud technologies allow companies like Netflix to have a pipeline on the cloud that creatives can access no matter where they are in the world. Large architectural firms are exploring using Global Production for projects to expand their talent pool while simultaneously reconfiguring or eliminating their offices.

Virtual Production

The Mandalorian is one of the projects receiving huge attention for its work using Virtual Production. Virtual production uses a suite of software packages to mix live-action footage with computer graphics in real-time. Filmmakers and other creatives working in the pipeline across multiple locations can deliver feedback across digital and physical environments where actors are physically working on the set. Unreal Engine by Epic Games is at the forefront of this technology, leading creatives on the cutting edge as the global environment changes in every aspect of production. Epic Games’ partners in virtual production include Digital Domain, ILM Lab, FOX VFX Lab, Halon Entertainment, Method Studios, and NVIDIA.

MORE: The Future of Filmmaking is here

SIGGRAPH 2021 didn’t have many new announcements, so we will talk about what they presented at SIGGRAPH this year.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA is one of the leaders in the world of Metaverse technologies. Over 500 companies are evaluating Omniverse.

NVIDIA announced on 10 August 2021 the expansion of the NVIDIA Omniverse platform. It is the world’s first real-time simulation collaborative platform delivering a foundation for the Metaverse. Blender and Adobe will open up Omniverse to millions of users, creating artists’ ability to collaborate in these packages interactively.

NVIDIA Omniverse is a technology platform leveraging a next-gen file format invented at Pixar and shared with the industry, plus the convergence of emergent technologies in cloud computing and hardware-accelerated real-time raytracing hardware combined with openly shared APIs for developers to plug into.

Omniverse gives artists a way to work together in real-time across different software applications in a shared virtual world. A key to Omniverse’s early adoption is Pixar’s open-sourced USD file format—the foundation of Omniverse’s collaboration and simulation platform. USD is being called the “HTML of the Metaverse.” Omniverse has a quickly growing ecosystem for supporting partners. Some of the early adopters are SHoP Architects in NYC, South Park, and Lockheed Martin.

A chart showing the technical formation of the Omniverse platform as a technology pipeline for production. (click to enlarge)

“The ability to make decisions quickly and accurately across our interdisciplinary team is core to SHoP’s process,” Geof Bell, Associate, Digital Design and Delivery at SHoP Architects. “Omniverse will enable us to bring data from multiple experts together in a single authoritative way, curating it to present the right information at the right time, paired with high-quality visuals for intelligent, evocative design.”

Apple, Pixar, and NVIDIA have collaborated to bring advanced physics to USD embracing the open standard to give 3D pipelines to billions of devices. Blender and NVIDIA have teamed on bringing USD support to the upcoming release of Blender 3.0. Adobe offers artists a way to work in real-time using the Substance Designer Collection of tools in the Omniverse.

3D research from NVIDIA Toronto unveiled GANverse3D Image2Car extension for Omniverse Create shown at SIGGRAPH 2021, and updates for the Kaolin library and Omniverse Kaolin App. NVIDIA research also announced research was addressing two of the most challenging problems in graphics—real-time path tracing and content creation using neural radiance cashing for global illumination.

Millions of people will work and play in the Metaverse, living through ground-breaking visual experiences that blur reality and virtual reality. What makes so much of this possible is the ability to render to screens life-like realism in real-time and to virtual headsets that provide stereoscopic 1:1 scale virtual experiences.

This method uses NVIDIA RT Cores for ray tracing and Tensor cores for AI acceleration. The neural network can adapt and learn how the light is distributed through the scene. NVIDIA research addresses texture difficulty to efficiently store and render, for example, the texture of a carpet or blades of grass through NeRF-Tex. NeRF-Tex approaches the use of neural networks to represent these challenging materials and encode how they respond to lighting. NVIDIA researchers have also developed a new approach to seeing the same geometry close-up or from a distance keeping the look realistic with the “inverse rendering method.” Creators can generate simpler models that are optimized to appear indistinguishable from the originals with drastic reductions in their geometric complexity.

NVIDIA also showed a documentary, “Connecting in the Metaverse: The Making of the GTC Keynote.” NVIDIA used the Omniverse to create the GTC Keynote. They made 21 versions for CEO Jensen Huang. The amount of technology NVIDIA used to develop his kitchen, which was 6000+ objects and hundreds of thousands of polygons, demonstrates the power of RTX rendering in the Omniverse.

All its amazing work in Omniverse leverages NVIDIA RTX technologies. Watch this special Siggraph 2021 presentation by Richard Kerris (formerly of Apple and Lucasfilm) and Sanja Fidler, both of NVIDIA. 

The kitchen had thousands of photographs that were put through a photogrammetry program to create a photorealistic kitchen. Jensen was scanned in a truck that came to his house to get an accurate model while adapting minimal data to animate him. Facial animation was driven by audio to gesture tools, and his body was animated with motion capture from an actor who imitates Jensen’s moves from past keynotes for these sessions. Also shown was how BMW used Omniverse to create and configure a vast factory and Drive Sim using Render RTX to display real-time driving in a Mercedes after building realistic backgrounds using point cloud data imported into Omniverse. NVIDIA also spoke about the latest version of PhysX delivering true Physics in simulations in Omniverse.

Omniverse is changing the way we work, create, and socialize. I can’t wait to see how architects use this technology in the future.

NVIDIA GPUs

The NVIDIA RTX A2000 was released during this SIGGRAPH, an inexpensive, low-cost entry-level solution for workstations delivering RTX for artists and other content creators.

The new NVIDIA RTX A2000 card is on the far left, along with other latest next-gen NVIDIA GPUs.

At 495 USD estimated retail value, the NVIDIA RTX A2000 has boasts:

• 13.25 million transistors
• 26 RT (ray tracing) cores
• 104 Tensor cores
• 3328 CUDA cores
• 8 TF (32-bit / single-precision)
• 15.6 TF for RT core performance
• 63.9 TF for Tensor core performance

More details and more pictures can be found at Architosh’s specific news report here.

Hewlett-Packard

HP showed off their Z solution in their workstations powered by NVIDIA RTX technology with ZCentral Remote Boost, a remote calibration software that just won HP an Emmy. HP did a white paper on HP ZCentral and NVIDIA Omniverse collaboration. ZCentral is a solution that allows creatives to connect to the powerful Z Workstations by HP, remotely and securely.

An example architecture using HP’s ZCentral and NVIDIA Omniverse.

The white paper describes HP ZCentral and Omniverse concepts, applications, and workflows supported—typical HP ZCentral based configurations and details for setting up Omniverse deployment. The intended audience is creatives, studios, and IT professionals.

You can download the Omniverse Beta here.

Epic Games

Epic Games announced billion-dollar funding round for the Metaverse in April. Content will be a driving force in creating these worlds, and Unreal Engine will be one of the leaders in developing this technology. Epic Games’ Marc Petit VP & General Manager and Patrick Cozzi CEO at Cesium co-hosted a Birds of a Feather session, “Building the Open Metaverse,” featuring technical presenters from various organizations. They discussed their hopes for standards in the Metaverse and want people to support a safe space.

What is Virtual Production? Epic layouts it out around their Unreal Engine technology in this diagram.

Epic Games gave us a preview of the upcoming release of Unreal Engine 4.27 for virtual production. VFX takes a giant leap forward in 4.27. New features will improve the ease of use, efficiency, and quality expected by filmmakers that involve game-changing techniques that are now more accessible and practical than ever. Unreal 5.0—still a bit out on the horizon—is in pre-release with limited features.

Epic Games also announced that Ariana Grande is stepping into the Metaverse as the headliner for the Fortnite Rift Tour.

Epic Games discussed the new OpenColorIO v2 for color management, a key in modern VFX, animation, gaming, and architectural software.

Amazon

Amazon Web Services presented sessions “Through the Looking Glass: The Next Reality of Content Production” and “The Future of Visual Effects.”

MORE: Varjo Unveils Reality Cloud—Groundbreaking Virtual Teleportation

Jen Dahlman from Amazon spoke about how the AWS internal teams of creatives worked from home to work on the animated short “Spanner” using the cloud. AWS was one of the early cloud solutions providers. VFX companies initially used the cloud for rendering and storage solutions, but access to applications through the cloud has increased due to demand during the pandemic. Software developers had to find a new way to deliver their applications via the cloud so creatives could use those tools in production.

Remote workforces are now a core part of Global Production and how the future of film and television production will change. Amazon talked about how cloud technology is helping professionals in the creative industry worldwide deal with today’s challenges and meet the increased demand for high fidelity content. Netflix has 36 productions currently using the cloud for Global Production. Netflix will increase Global Production for all their future projects.

Learn more about SIGGRAPH in Part 2 after the click.

The post SIGGRAPH 2021 — Year of the Metaverse, and Virtual and Global Production (Part 1) appeared first on Architosh.

At Autodesk University 2019, back in November of 2019, Anthony and I got a peek into this version. We were so excited by what we saw that the Twinmotion 2020 review became a bit of a group effort, with Anthony—along with my husband, Kevin Cahill, an architect, visualization, and VFX Hollywood professional—all contributing to the evaluation. Anthony provided additional insight and the pros and cons section at the end. Let’s get into it!

Twinmotion 2020 Intro

Initially, Twinmotion was created by French Visualization Studio KA-RA. It was created as a way for architects with limited 3D experience to create stunning still or animated renders for clients. After a brief partnership with the French AEC software company, Abvent, Epic Games acquired Twinmotion in 2019.

Twinmotion 2020 is a real-time immersive 3D architecture visualization tool for efficiently producing high-quality images, panoramas, and standard or 360 VR videos quickly without long render times. Twinmotion combines an easy to use interface with the power of the Unreal Engine 4. It is available for both Mac and PC.

Twinmotion 2020 has many enhanced visuals due to new Unreal Engine features like a physically-based sky and sun model and more realistic vegetation.

Twinmotion is also a great stepping stone for the Unreal Engine environment, and in the future, we hope there is a direct link between Twinmotion and Unreal Engine. It should be stated that being built on one of the world’s top game engines, the exposure Twinmotion has is massive. There are over 436,000 registered users since May 2019, a comparable worth noting as Unreal Engine 4 itself has over 7.5 million downloads. Epic itself is now claiming that Twinmotion is the number one real-time rendering solution used in both architecture and production and the number one rendering solution being tested in all aspects of different creative industries. Importantly for the Architosh’s legacy audience—and this has been noted several times before—it is the only real-time rendering solution native on the Mac platform in addition to Windows, leaving Bentley’s LumenRT and the very worthy Lumion exclusive to the Windows platform.

New Features in 2020 Version

Twinmotion 2020 is based on the 4.24 release of the Unreal Engine, with new volumetric light tools and screen-space global illumination (GI). There is also a new physically-based atmospheric sun and sky model (recently just added to Unreal Engine) and cinematic depth of field (DoF). Kevin, who has been using Twinmotion in archviz production work, noted that color bleed issues from the sun seem to be better if not very much solved entirely.

An example of the Depth of Field features in Twinmotion 2020.

At at a foundation level, the UI/UX is roughly the same though there are several improvements in this area related to feature groups we will discuss in a moment. Twinmotion 2020, like all versions, seeks to deliver professional quality images using an interface that the average architect or non-visualization pro can learn quickly. Some items in the UI are hidden on purpose to simplify the workflow; the challenge for the photo-realistic rendering entrant is remembering what tools exist in the more hidden portions of the UI and learning the logic of why they are there in the first place.

Vegetation Improvements

Vegetation assets are much improved in this 2020 release, being upgraded in polycount from tree models from XfrogPlants collections and brushes from Megascans Library (acquired by Epic in 2019). The selections of vegetation are mostly excellent, a lack of southwestern plants and cacti notwithstanding. Phoenix and Los Angeles architects may get a wee bit frustrated but Epic has already heard about this feedback so we expect a redress soon.

You can now blend different grasses into a vegetation layer and edit their individual characteristics rather than re-apply vegetation adjustments with the brush tools.

Epic seems to have made two primary improvements in this department. One, the image quality is much improved (as already noted). Second, it is now easier and faster to place vegetation and in a more realistic way.

Vegetation scattering uses a brush-based system giving users the ability to paint trees, bushes, and grasses quickly. Painting layers make it possible now to add items to the layer, place them with the brush, and then go back and edit the items on the layer. You can control the growth of your vegetation by selecting the plant or group and using sliders to cycle through the age (and thus usually height, width) of your vegetation.

Trees in Twinmotion 2020 now scale by age intelligently and more realistically, not just by geometry.

New in this release, when you age your trees in particular, they don’t just scale the geometry up and down but change as the tree would actually change over time. When you add trees to a paint layer, you can add two copies of the same tree and individually select and edit its settings, like age (height) and density. You can quickly create more realistic site environs by painting this layer with a brush and then adding species variety to it and then tweaking the settings of each item in the layer to create scale and density diversity.

This also works with grass, both turf type, and wild variety. And speaking of grasses, a new setting tells Twinmotion 2020 to fade the grass as you zoom further away from it, thereby saving your processor resources. There are different distance settings for this. Grasses are processor-intensive so this greatly aids in keeping Twinmotion 2020 running smoothly.

Finally, vegetation works more realistically in animations, including when wind runs through leaves on plants and trees.

next page: Lighting, People, BIM and Other Improvements

The post Product Review: Twinmotion 2020 appeared first on Architosh.

Terminator: Dark Fate

AMD’s 3rd Generation Ryzen Threadripper was a major part of the success in Blur’s pipeline, designed to give powerful options for creatives who do art, visualization, and effects with intense simulations to give artists a powerful solution to crunch lots of data at a great price point.

Tim Miller directed “Terminator: Dark Fate” and enlisted Blur’s help to work on the complex visual effects’ shots in the movie. There is a scene where one of the new Terminator models splits in two creating two unique machines. The simulation time to create this effect was optimized and made possible with the new Threadripper. The scene had an entire digital apocalyptic world, complete with photo-realistic details and an inconceivable amount of rendering.

This is what immerses us in the vision of director Tim Miller. Something that took 5 minutes, took 5 seconds. The scenes in “Terminator: Dark Fate” had several simulations, elaborately detailed futuristic environments, and digital characters with photo-realistic realism. 75 to 100 layers of effects for a shot. Threadripper 3rd generation allowed for close real-time composites, difficult with Blur’s previous pipeline.

AMD’s James Knight & Director Tim Miller. All rights reserved.

The previous generation of Threadripper 2 was implemented to see how it would perform. When Blur’s new CTO Shawn Walbridge contacted James Knight about Threadripper for Houdini artists to speed up their workflow, Threadripper was 3 times faster with renders than their previous chip.

“When Terminator came around, there were expectations of the visual style on Terminator. AMD and Blur partnered to implement AMD’s Threadripper 3rd Generation into their pipeline” says James Knight, “it allowed Blur to do near, real-time rendering from a CPU, allowing them to do revisions on the desktop of the artists instead of waiting on a server. It really increased productivity instantly.” AMD gave Blur their only samples outside of AMD to create the stunning visuals in “Terminator: Dark Fate”. “It was this incredible partnership that gave us the terrifying new Terminator that split in two, giving us a new faster foe with double the problems for our protagonists.”

3rd AMD Generation Ryzen Threadripper

The 3rd AMD Generation Ryzen Threadripper line-up features a 24 core, 48 thread, and 32 core and 54 thread chip built on the industry-leading 7nm “Zen 2” core architecture boasting up to 88 PCIe® 4.0 lanes and 144MB cache with superb power efficiency.

Ryzen Threadripper is achieving up to 90 percent faster performance over the competition’s top HEDT processor. The new 32 core Ryzen Threadripper 3970x processor offers performance as the most powerful and fastest desktop processor in the high-end desktop market at a reasonable price. AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3970X offers much better performance specs than the competition for content creatives and artists with insane amounts of computation including:

• Up to 90% faster performance in Cinebench R20
• Up to 47% increased performance in Adobe Premiere
• Up to 49% increased performance in V-Ray
• Up to 43% increased performance in Chromium Release 78 Compile
• Up to 36% increased performance in Unreal Engine
• AMD in tandem of the launch of the Threadripper 3 rd Generation unveiled a new Socket sTX4, optimized for near, and long-term scalability of the Ryzen Threadripper platform. Offering 4 times more bandwidth to the chipset then the previous second-generation Threadripper. It delivers 2.5 times more available bandwidth than the competition for peripherals like SSD or GPU’s. The 3rd Generation Ryzen Threadripper offers the ultimate HEDT platform without compromise.

Conclusion

Artists who create visualizations in today’s world of demanding deadlines with larger-scale expectations can really use AMD’s 3rd Generation Ryzen Threadripper. It is a tool that can help increase productivity at a great price point. The AEC industry is now implementing VR/AR visualization with traditional 3D visualization, so Threadripper 3rd Generation can be a powerful solution for implementing these technologies for your clients.

Availability and prices

The AMD 3rd Generation Ryzen Threadripper was available since November 2019. AMD 24 Core/48 thread for $1399 and AMD 32/64 thread for $1999.

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Technology is helping to create a better world without a negative impact on the planet. Automation and AI were a key part of the discussion and the tools used to help redundant operations in manufacturing, building, and engineering perform with one click instead of multiple clicks.

Autodesk announced Construction Cloud with an integrated construction management platform with Assemble, Building Connected, BIM 360 and PlanGrid that connects with AutoCAD, Revit and Civil 3D. (see: Architosh, “Autodesk Ushers in New Era of Connected Construction with Autodesk Construction Cloud,” 20 Nov 19).

Build Change—Noted by Autodesk

Build Change was the recipient of the AU Las Vegas 2019 Donation Drive. Dr. Elizabeth Hausler from Build Change, a member of the Autodesk Foundation spoke at the keynote about how the loss of housing is on a much larger scale for natural disasters in places like Columbia, Iran, and Guatemala City.

Dr. Elizabeth Hausler speaking at AU19 in Las Vegas, about her work at Building Change, a non-profit focused on resiliency solutions for housing in countries with substandard building construction and vulnerable construction. (image: Autodesk. All rights reserved.)

She spoke about how putting Geodesic homes in some of these environments is not a real solution as people who are allotted these homes find them alien to the way they live and didn’t have a say in the design and can’t trust them to be reliable. Autodesk provides software licenses, training and more for Build Change to solve these problems.

Build Change started using AutoCAD 15 years ago. Now they are automating doing “retrofit-design” with Revit and Dynamo; coding in Dynamo the structural retrofit rules and using Revit to complete the design process. AI technology can accelerate the identification and assessment of damage in homes in a destructive event like a hurricane or earthquake and show the scale of the destruction to give more accurate data through machine learning. What took 3 people 4 to 5 days in the past now takes 1 person 3 hours.

Images of Build Changes work and workflow using Autodesk Revit and Dynamo. (image: Architosh. All rights reserved.)

They are using AI to show how homes are assessed because it costs money to send people out in the field to do this manually. Individual assessments can be done when homeowners upload photos to the cloud, and the machine is trained with the data from the image captures to scan if the homes can be retrofitted. Technology should not leave out the people element. Revit and BIM 360 provide ways to use VR to give homeowners the ability to walk through the home design and give comments and participate in the design process.

Build Change creates housing solutions for about a half million people in substandard housing countries and Autodesk technology is helping them to do this better. Autodesk awarded Build Change at the keynote a half-million dollars to help them continue their mission to build safer homes around the world.

Walt Disney and Autodesk

Asa Kalama, Executive Creative Director at Walt Disney Imagineering spoke about Disney’s work on Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge. He spoke about how to build the experiences that people love from the stories they love. His team created a large-scale city design and seven spaceships—including 100-foot-long Millennial Falcon—worked with concept artists, graphic designers, architects, engineers to create over 600 different models that were fabricated for the Star Wars theme park.

Asa Kalama, Excutive Creative Director at Walt Disney Imagineering, speaking at AU19 about his teams and their use of Autodesk software solutions like Revit and BIM 360 along with Shotgun. Do you recognize the Millennium Falcon’s cockpick in orange on the left image? (image: All rights reserved.)

BIM 360 and Revit made it possible for teams from different disciplines to connect to create all these assets to completion. Autodesk Shotgun, primarily for props management, was used to coordinate assets and work between different teams allowing them to work together providing feedback and keeping the job on track. This was the largest expansion of the Disney Park ever created.

There are many other exciting announcements made during the keynotes at Autodesk University this year but these two above were notable. In this first of two major feature reports from AU19—not to mention several smaller reports on Architosh already published and in the pipeline—we focus on some major items from the Expo floor. (note: we have highlighted Autodesk products in blue when they integrate with third-party tools noted below).

Unity

Unity formed a partnership with Autodesk in 2018. At AU19 this year they announced the next phase of that collaboration. There are several aspects of the Autodesk + Unity partnership touching on multiple Autodesk products across disciplines.

Unity’s Unity Reflect for Revit transforms collaboration workflows with AEC stakeholders by delivering live-sync BIM model and meta data to multiple stakeholders for building and infrastructure projects. Shown here on Apple iPad. (image: Autodesk. All rights reserved.)

One key one is Unity Reflect for Revit and BIM 360 which we have a dedicated report on. (see: Architosh, “AU19: Autodesk and Unity Tout New Unity Reflect at AU—Available Today,” 2 Dec 2019)

• Unity and Autodesk Revit: enhanced interoperability to reduce time and money for designers and engineers in visualization workflows, using Unity Reflect. Interoperability helps users know they are using the very latest BIM model, optimized for downstream interactive 3D to create high fidelity Unity applications such as interactive walkthroughs or collaborative construction solutions. It will create streamline workflows importing BIM data visualizations directly from Revit into Unity Reflect and Unity projects.
• Unity and Autodesk VRED: reduced time to market and more performant, reliable products for Automotive. The integration will help make it easier to reuse high fidelity VRED data (environments, lighting, materials, and animation) directly inside Unity and run them on 25+ platforms including PC, VR/AR, and mobile.
• Unity and Autodesk Shotgun: offering increased productivity on projects in Media and Entertainment (M&E).  Unity and Autodesk are working on an integrated solution for teams in managing multiple types of assets in production. Artists won’t have to worry about managing their files and can focus on their creative flow. Animators and modelers will be able to work in the context of a sequence with real-time feedback on changes to the scene file including lighting, camera location, or asset selection. Supervisors can track the analytics for a more accurate evaluation of artist management. I imagine this is what was used in the movie The Lion King.

Unity is creating a way to save time and money giving you an accurate model that can be imported back into Unity and using 3DS Max can give you the ability to do smart and high-fidelity visualization.

Twinmotion 2020

Twinmotion 2020 was on the show floor at Autodesk University giving us a preview into the new version with better photorealistic images, better characters, better vegetation, and better rendering.

Twinmotion 2020 was on display at AU19 inside the Unreal Engine booth.

Some of the new features we saw in the booth

• Growth allows you to scale vegetation by age. Trees get younger or older and grow instantly.
• Improved new characters including animated characters with new controls. The new characters have better animation and a better selection of clothing.
• Improved vegetation with incredible detail views. Growth was just one of the tools demonstrated.
• Depth of field control. You can move where you want depth of field to be in the scene, this is pretty cool.
• An X-ray mode that was demonstrated to show where piping and ducts were in a model, a very convincing display scene.
• Improved rendering
• Improved textures
• Improved syncing

Twinmotion works with Autodesk Revit but also works with other CAD and BIM tools. We have much more to say about Twinmotion and its goals in AEC in a special feature in the December issue of the free INSIDER Xpresso newsletter (due 4 Dec)

Twinmotion 2020 will be a big release and worth the price of buying it (no set price yet) to help architects, engineers, production artists, and other visualization artists create one-click solutions that will be more powerful with this release. We can see in future updates a connection to the Unreal Engine is on the roadmap, giving artists who want to learn Unreal Engine a great starting point. Again, for the reader interested in what is really coming next for Twinmotion and Unreal Engine sign-up for our Xpresso newsletter. If you sign-up after 4 December 2019, you can visit the past issues and link to issue #10.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA’s RTX technology is empowering designers in “visualization” from architectural design to virtual production with a powerful GPU solution. Real-time rendering has never been so powerful as with RTX Technology.

• NVIDIA booth on the show floor showed off the NVIDIA CloudXR technology that delivers low latency AR/VR streaming.  A car appears on your mobile phone when you point to a location. Live-streaming to the mobile device using CloudXR technology; it is amazing technology. An incredible way to share visual design elements.
• Luxion Keyshot 9 integrated with the NVIDIA OptiX raytracing engine for quick realistic images with animations driven by RTX Ray tracing and AI denoising. This gives quick real-time response in Keyshot with high fidelity photo realism.
• Chaos Group V-Ray with RTX technology was able to do real-time ray tracing and rendering using Project Lavina. This was the very latest Lavina code base. Project Lavina can ray trace huge 3D scenes without the workarounds or raster graphics. Artists can drag and drop their V-Ray scenes to see them in real-time without the complex set up of the game engine workflow found currently. It was really fast and didn’t disappoint!
• Virtual production pipelines are accelerated with Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstations on NVIDIA RTX servers. These were in the booth running several demos at once and they were quite impressive.
• Unreal Engine had their real-time VR experience of the Apollo Moon Landing doing real-time renders of photorealistic animations on RTX cards. This was inside the Unreal booth but again based on RTX technology.

RTX technology has become the leader in GPU rendering and real-time visualization. NVIDIA keeps pushing its technology further to see what it can do. AI is helping them automate tasks in visualization workflows.

Inside the NVIDIA booth at AU19 and looking at Enscape being powered by NVIDIA RTX graphics cards.

This is technology, by the way, that is missing on the Apple macOS platform and saw heated backlash by many VFX and visualization pros after Apple announced their 2019 Mac Pro with apparently concerning support for Nvidia inside this amazing new machine. You can sign a petition now 18k strong asking Apple to work with Nvidia on CUDA and RTX support for future Macs, here.

AMD

AMD was showing off its new GPU AMD Radeon Graphics solution in its W5700 card, the world’s first 7nm professional workstation graphics card. This is a mid-range card that challenges the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 by price and consistency when rendering.

AMD’s latest professional graphics cards aimed at AEC pros, the Radeon Pro W5700, the first AMD card built on a 7nm process. (image: Akiko Ashley / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

According to AMD stats, 86% of AEC users use mid-range computers, and this card delivers a powerful solution for users at a lower cost and delivers the power for future higher-end solutions for those migrating into using more advanced tools.

• AMD RDNA architecture delivers 25 percent better performance per clock up to 41% higher performance per watt.
• High bandwidth PCIe 4.0 delivering double the bandwidth of PCIe 3 to deliver smooth and consistent performance.
• Exceptional Power Efficiency enables up to 18% better system efficiency.
• AMD’s GPU/CPU’s multitasking work together to deliver a powerful punch at 5.6 X the application workflow performance with CPU load versus the competition in the SPECviewperf 13 benchmark.
• This is the first card to offer USB-C ports.
• The W5700 offers Wireless VR support. It is a smart solution with multiple solutions for a complete solution for AEC visualization artists.

In a demonstration in the AMD booth, it was interesting to see the W5700 beating the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 card rendering a scene. At $799 this card is a bargain for its performance.

Autodesk 3ds Max

3DS Max gives a clear roadmap of the future of 3DS Max on the AREA website.

• 3DS Max will be connected to the cloud through Forge. The first step was to add 3DS Max to the cloud and add support for 3DS Max and the Forge Viewer. Second, was to simplify using 3DS Max as an automation tool. This will make 3DS Max available through the Cloud with other Autodesk applications.
• 3DS Max Batch was released in 2018 as a true console application that starts faster, consumes less memory, reports feedback in the console, enable parameter injection at the command line and return error codes. Past command lines were used for rendering but now can also be used for any automation purpose.
• 3DS Max has added new character crowd tools in Populate Crowd which allows more control over how a character’s behavior can be modified to prevent collisions, repetitive behavior, and adjust motion capture files. Architects can create background actors that feel and look more realistic in their visualization animations. It was cool watching characters move with intelligence and very natural.
• 3DS Max introduced a specific set of tools to simplify the retopology process. AI plays a huge part in this process by automating unwrapping a mesh or UV map and properly applying UV maps, so they don’t appear distorted or stretched in the render. Automating this process into a one-click process saves time and increases productivity.

The Wild

The Wild is an immersive collaboration platform for users to work together in XR. This allows users wherever they are to work together from anywhere in the world. It is used for presentation, review, and coordination. The Wild recently announced partnerships with Autodesk BIM 360 and Igloo Vision. Once your team has enabled The Wild within BIM 360, you can authenticate your BIM 360 account from an app. When you create a space, you’ll have the option to seed it with any model from your BIM 360 account. These features provide a streamlined workflow that is quick and easy.

A view of The Wild that importantly shows that multiple stakeholders can be immersed and collaborating and be at different scales from each other in the same immersive experience.

Some of the features demonstrated at the Autodesk University show include:

• Friendly intuitive avatars that collaborate inside the space. I like the fact you can see through the avatars so you aren’t distracted by it.
• Portals to transport through spaces. A little disconcerting but you adapt to it quickly. It can be activated through a menu.
• Measuring tool to measure the size of objects.
• Sketch directly on whatever you wish and create massing objects for illustrating design ideas. It works the same way as a tablet. You draw using a button on the handset by clicking on a menu bar and selecting the drawing tool. Easy and simple interface. There is a “massing modeling” tool for creating primitives to demonstrate an idea inside of the VR scene to conceptualize ideas.
• Voice to text, creating a text bubble to leave a note in the VR environment by selecting the text to voice icon on the menu. At first, it didn’t exactly copy what I said to text but I can see with practice this gets better. You can leave the text note behind and later someone else can read it and use it for feedback.
• BIM 360 files stay up to date in The Wild with any changes in BIM 360. I watched the scene change in real-time.

This is a simple and easy to use VR solution with a lot of cool features to help visualize important design concepts and work with a team seamlessly in a single VR scene and give the ability to communicate ideas visually. Any level user can adapt to doing VR on the fly.

The Autodesk BIM 360 integration is an important feature. The Wild started with SketchUp support but quickly moved to support Autodesk Revit. It works with a wide variety of BIM and 3D software solutions but the integration with BIM 360 is another big win for Autodesk’s CDE platform.

Varjo

VARJO and Lenovo announced a co-operation agreement for technical and business collaboration between the two companies, at Autodesk University. The new partnership will create “Certified for Varjo” pairings on Lenovo desktop and mobile workstations for all Varjo Human HMD’s. This combines the world-leading professional VR/XR products with powerful high-end computers enabling enterprise organizations to adopt and implement VR.

Architosh’s editor trying out the VR-1. Varjo’s VR-1 headset is by far the most expensive on the market but its “human-eye” resolution is astounding enabling entirely new types of workflows due to the visual fidelity and detail now possible in a virtual environment. (image: Akiko Ashley / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

I tried the Varjo human eye resolution headset—as did Architosh’s editor-in-chief, Anthony Frausto-Robledo—with its really cool features. The visual quality is like no other headset on the market.

• 20/20 Tracker that follows your eyes to create an experience personally fitted for you. Eye calibration helps to fit the headset, so it feels natural.
• Resolution of over 60 PPD and better peripheral vision. I can look around a room without seeing an edge.
• Integrated hand tracking by UltraLeap gives you the ability not to use handsets, or you can use handsets to navigate with point and click, so you can point to a place, click and you travel to that spot.
• An airport scene opened on the screen and you could select an object or plane to reveal information about the object or plane.
• High-end fidelity image quality (Human Eye resolution) so you can see the print of a book close up including the details where old text from a handwritten note had faded.
• Support for Steam VR and OpenVR will provide large third-party support offerings and integrations.

I have to say these are some of the best goggles I’ve ever used for VR considering I’m prone to vertigo. Eye calibration helps make the experience seamless. Anthony is planning to write some additional comments about Varjo in one if his upcoming reports as well.

Substance (an Adobe Company)

Substance’s booth was demonstrating Substance Painter, Substance Designer and the new Substance Alchemist showing off new features in Substance Painter that were announced at Adobe MAX.

The node graph approach to working with the creation of materials (textures) for 3D rendering in Substance Designer.

Substance Painter Brush engine will match more closely to Photoshop’s.

• Enhancements include improving pen pressure accuracy, adding new brush settings, such as minimum size and blending modes, supporting ABR format.
• In the coming months, the team will ship a collection of ABR brushes alongside the next Substance Painter release.
• The demo shows how this makes it easier for users of the Creative Suite to embrace developing 3D projects using features similar to how they work in 2D.

Alchemist is out of beta. The flexibility in Alchemist allows you to create and manage your own library of 3D textures, mix, and tweak existing materials, and make entirely new materials from photos and high-resolution scans. Alchemist is easy to use and intuitive to how artists work.

Closing Comments

Autodesk’s slogan “Better Starts Here” is about technology empowering architects, engineers, designers, artists, graphic designers and real people to participate in creating “socially responsible” design.

Technology has a role in making the world a better place. As software moves to the cloud, AI automates repetitive tasks, and collaboration in VR helps us work with teams from anywhere in the world, we can now work more efficiently and be more productive than ever—helping people and companies do the best work of their lives now for a better world.

[Editor’s note: Hereo image

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About Quixel

The Swedish software developer has particular expertise in photogrammetry using using Megascans of 2D and 3D physically-based assets. There asset library of scans—over 10,000 in total—will now be free with to use with the Unreal Engine. Ten high resolution packs have been shared on the Unreal Marketplace. The popular Iceland collection used in “Rebirth” assets are also available for free.

Quixel is now part of Epic Games and Unreal Engine (UE) users gain free access to Megascans, Quixel Mixer and Quixel Bridige.

Quixel Mixer and Quixel Bridge—two of the company’s software solutions that run on both Windows and macOS (and Linux for Bridge)—are free to use for all regardless of Engine choice or license type. Quixel users can look forward to more downloads per month, and more generous license terms.  

Epic recently partnered with Quixel and other companies on a groundbreaking virtual production demo for creating in-camera visual effects. Today, Epic is sharing, behind the scenes video exploring opportunities for artists working in film and television production with new features in Unreal Engine and high-fidelity visual assets from Quixel.  The AEC industry benefits from this collaboration providing new features for artists working on high-end visualization. 

“Building photorealistic 3D content is an expensive endeavor in game development and film production. By coming together with Quixel to make Megascans free for all use in Unreal Engine, this level of artistry is now available to everyone from triple-A studios to indies,” said Epic Games Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. 

“Our mission at Quixel has always been to make the world more accessible for everyone through ultra-high resolution scanning. As part of Epic Games, we’re now able to accelerate this vision as we grow the Megascans library, speed up the development of Bridge and Mixer, and improve integrations with all major 3D software and renderers,” said Quixel Co-founder Teddy Bergsman.

Upgrades to Unreal Engine Version 4.24

Epic also announced a better streamlined workflows that advance Unreal Engine for all creators Starting with Unreal 4.24 release features such as Datasmith suite of plugins, static mesh editing and the Variant Manager now ship as a unified binary tool. 

Quixel’s software solutions run on both Windows and macOS.

Unreal 4.24 now ships with many new upgrades and features:

• New nondestructive, layer-based Landscape workflows enable more interesting and engaging outdoor environments where the terrain automatically adapts to other elements in the world.
• The Sky Atmosphere component generates a physically-accurate sky that can be updated dynamically depending on the time of day, and it can be viewed from the ground or from the air to create realistic-looking planetscapes.
• The new experimental strand-based hair and fur system brings characters to life with realistic, flowing hair.
• Screen-space global illumination allows for natural light-filled spaces using fewer resources.
• The Live Universal Scene Description (USD) Stage Actor creates a direct link to the USD file on disk for faster iteration and better collaboration.
• Project creation workflow now includes a wizard-style workflow centered around the industry or type of project you are creating so you only see relevant settings and tools.

Epic also announced that the Twinmotion free download has been extended to first quarter 2020 until the new release of Twinmotion. Epic says the new release will offer greater photorealism, improved assets, and tools to facilitate collaborative workflows among other features. Twinmotion is a highly intuitive solution for the AEC industry. 

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

Quixel’s software tools, particularly Mixer, are solid tools that would be of use to the company’s advanced segment of its entry level app users—Twinmotion users. The ability to work swiftly in Twinmotion is one of the apps strongest appeas but the ability to customize and provide your projects with textures that are highly specific to your projects would be highly valued by many architectural visualization professsionals. While there is not specific word on where Quixel’s acquired assets will touch down on Twinmotion users versus Unreal Engine users, ultimately we do know today that Epic plans a bridge of sorts to bring users up-market from Twinmotion to Unreal Engine over time. — Anthony Frausto-Robledo

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A brilliant multitasker, Keely has guided her unique vision of art and architecture through the formation of her studio Kilograph. Founded in 2009, the studio recently just announced “Imagined Landscapes” a VR Experience featuring the unbuilt Michael Graves project, Barranco de Veneguera. The amazing project takes a different kind of view of computerized rendering, creatively transcribing Graves’ famous watercoloring techniques to the realm of VR (virtual reality). The effect is stunning.

An image from the “Imagined Landscapes” trailer at Kilograph. (image: Kilograph)

When I came to her office, I found her to be quiet and deep in thought. She is impressive and well-spoken, showing off the incredible work that Kilograph does. With both under-graduate and graduate degrees in architecture, she spent her formative years inside some of the world’s most impressive architecture firms—working for Rem Koolhaus (OMA) and AMO, Bruce Mau Design, Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), and Ateliers Jean Nouvel. She has also worked as a pre-visualization artists on the films Iron Man and Superman Returns.

We sat down to talk about her career in architectural visualization and her role as President of the American Society of Architectural Illustrators.

The Interview

(Akiko Ashley) Keely, can you tell us a brief overview of your career and how it led to you building your own company, Kilograph? 

(Keely Colcleugh) I started Kilograph 10 years ago after a stint as an in-house visualization artist at Jean Nouvel’s office in Paris. Prior to this, I had worked as a previz animator, an architect at SOM, and a graphic designer at Bruce Mau. There didn’t seem to be a firm out there that combined everything I was interested in, so I started my own.

Can you tell us about your role as President of American Society of Architectural Illustrators? 

As President, I am primarily responsible for organizing the annual conference – “Architecture in Perspective” and the competitions (student and professional). The ASAI is a really interesting organization. They have been around since 1986 and initially focused on the manual methods—hand drawing and watercolor painting—of architectural representation. As techniques have evolved, ASAI has been the home base for integration of digital artwork into archviz.

The society remains dedicated to ideas of upholding architectural perspectivism as a profession including the education process, the establishment of standards, as well as important dialogues about perception, professionalism, and stewardship. The idea with the organization has always been to establish the architectural perspectivist as a respected consultant and partner to the architects and architectural firms instead of a “vendor”.  These are all very important discussions amidst the global proliferation of digital archviz artists and small companies. Many of these artists are just becoming aware of their value in the design process and how they’re a part of a shared history.

Keely’s firm office is inside the iconic American Cement Building in Los Angeles. This amazing facade in concrete is an apt background of sorts—and filter of light—for the incredibly talented artists that work at Kilograph. (image: Akiko Ashley / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

My interest in becoming President was to see how we could engage this new generation of architects—students—in the values of the ASAI.

This is the 34th year for Architecture in Perspective Conference, what do you think is different about the Conference this year than previous years?

This year was all about education. Both in the sense that we were reaching out to more students and schools for the conference, but also recognizing that there are related fields that use some of the same techniques and thought processes. Regardless of our age or number of years in the profession, we can always learn from a new perspective (no pun intended). So we are having artists, matte painters, environment artists, and art directors from the film industry speaking alongside watercolorists and prominent architectural visualization pioneers like Eric de Broche des Combes, who founded Luxigon.

What are some of the key events at this conference?

The Gnomon panel is something we are really excited about. It is free and open to the public and we hope this is a chance to share the value of architectural visualization with the broader entertainment community here in LA.

Can you tell me about the Hugh Ferriss Memorial Prize? 

The Hugh Ferriss Memorial Prize is the top award for an image, across all categories, in the annual professional competition. It is named for the pioneer of architectural delineation, Hugh Ferriss. Ferriss was a prominent draftsperson and early illustrator whose dramatic depictions of futuristic cities served as the inspiration for places like Batman’s Gotham City. This year, the winner is a past President! This might mean I should get back to making images again.

What do you think has been changing over the years in architectural visualization?

The proliferation of digital tools that make creating an image much easier. Also the image culture—Instagram and Tumblr—has created a new breed of clients who have specific aesthetic requests. There are also many many more artists around the world than ever before.

Architectural visualization & design is now part of the pipelines in film, television and games. Can you explain to architects reading this, how they might use their skills in these pipelines?

The world surrounding the narrative is increasingly defining the story. As the environments improve fidelity and become more immersive, the stakes grow higher for productions. There will always be a need to create authentic environments—both historical and futuristic—for entertainment. Architects are perfectly positioned for this role. They possess all the skills they need right out of school.

Can you tell me about Kilograph and the work you do, and can you share a recent project? 

We are a creative studio dedicated to communicating the value of unbuilt architectural and urban design projects. This includes infrastructure initiatives, retail environments, and any project that could benefit from “spatial storytelling”. Our interest in progressive communications has extended to include more story-driven film narratives, immersive environments, interface design and app development, and environmental graphics and wayfinding.

Our most recent project is “Imagined Landscapes,” an immersive new VR experience that explores the work of Michael Graves. We were inspired by both his “Imagined Landscapes” paintings and the work his team did on the Barranco de Veneguera resort concept, so we created a way for people to visit that resort and paint it in using VR watercolors.

What are some of the key tools you use in your work and creativity?

Whiteboards, coffee, candy, conversations. It has changed a lot since I’ve stopped working alone at the computer. I find value in discussing concepts with our artists and hearing their opinions and perspectives. They amaze me.

What types of art influence your work and vision?

It depends on the project and what we are trying to achieve. That said, I admire the photography of Iwan Baan and reference it often. In terms of cinematography and directing, the work of Michael Mann and Terrence Malick are among my favorites. The strength of Barbara Kruger’s conceptual art and the newer work by groups like Team Labs and Refik Anadol are also greatly inspiring.

Unreal Engine and Unity are now entering the visualization market for architectural visualization, what are your thoughts on technology in architectural visualization?

Technology and its evolution is an instrumental part of the workflow in archviz. With successive iterations of software and more streamlined processes we are liberating the artist to create, and to create increasingly immersive scenes.

Kilograph’s Suspension House wins top honors at CGArchitect 3D Awards. You can read the story here.

The definition of architectural visualization is shifting to include more mediums like VR and AR. We need new processes and software to achieve this. Our studio has been using both Unreal and Unity for the past five years. At first it seemed like a novelty, but now it is an instrumental part of how we work.

What architects influenced you? What are some of your favorite architectural projects?

Le Corbusier and Rem Koolhaas are my all time favorites. I also greatly admire the work of Jeanne Gang, Zaha Hadid, and quietly groundbreaking firms like MOS. My favorite buildings are the convent La Tourette by Le Corbusier, the Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City by Alberto Kalach and Juan Palomar, and the Sheats-Goldstein residence here in LA by John Lautner.

Thank you Keely, looking forward to Architecture in Perspective…    

More Information on Kilograph and ASAI

Kilograph Turns Unrealized Michael Graves Designs into VR Watercolor Experiences

For more information about ASAI go to https://www.asai.org/

If you like to attend Architecture in Perspective https://www.asai.org/conference/

The post Architecture in Perspective—An Interview with Keely Colcleugh of Kilograph appeared first on Architosh.

Open Source is Thriving

Open Source was the featured topic. Open Source is thriving in development in all aspects of the pipeline in 3D software industries.

JPR Luncheon session had industry leaders talking about the revolutionary effect of open source in the pipeline.

The JPR Luncheon featured “The revolutionary effect of open source software for creative applications”. This was an interesting topic with great experts on the subject including Hank Driskill from Blue Sky Studios, Daniella Costa VP of Visual Effects of Marvel Studios, John Wadelton, CTO of the Foundry and Guy Martin, Director of Open Source Strategy for Autodesk.

A shot of the Blender booth prior during a quiet moment on the expo floor Ton Roosendaal received a special award for his software Blender during the luncheon.

The discussion was focused on the future of open source in the pipeline and how it would benefit creatives and give them more flexibility. USD was mentioned due to being implemented in so many pipelines now and the huge benefits. Ton Roosendaal received a special award at the luncheon for his wonderful software Blender.

Universal Scene Description — A New Emerging Standard

USD stands for Universal Scene Description and it was created by Pixar. In 2015 Pixar announced that they would make their Universal Scene Description Open Source. USD was first presented at SIGGRAPH 2013. USD provides a standard for exchanging complex Animation and VFX scene data.

USD (universal scene description) language running on Apple Metal.

There is also an embeddable visualization to the Hydra renderer. USD goes further than Alembic by describing the structure of the entire scene not just individual assets. It supports layering, file referencing, geometry and sharing variants for each asset in the scene and inheritance. Each of the cooperating applications in the pipeline including modeling, shading, animation, lighting and FX can now be assembled into another applications in a nondestructive form with a single consistent API. This means less baking down of your data. This gives the industry a standard to ease the headache of importing, translation, and exporting. It allows creatives in different areas of the pipeline to collaborate on the same scenes without having to wait for one person to finish.

Autodesk announced support of USD at this year’s SIGGRAPH. NVIDIA is using USD for the foundation of Omniverse, a live collaboration platform that connects a wide variety of content creations tools to each other and to the real time RTX engine; The Foundry, Unity, Epic Games (Unreal Engine), Pixar, Animal Logic are already developing uses for USD in their applications.

Neil Trevett, President of The Khronos Group and Vice President at NVIDIA.

Open XR, is another cool open source technology from the Khronos Group that is setting a new standard for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality application developers to help streamline their pipelines from going from one SDK to another. Open XR allows games and other applications to work easily across a variety of platforms without dealing with proprietary SDK’s. AMD, NVIDIA, Valve, Microsoft, Epic Games Unity, LG, Samsung, Sony, Varjo, Nokia, and Google are among industry supporters. Open XR Application Interface is available now and Open XR Device Plug in interface is coming soon.

NVIDIA RTX is a graphics rendering development platform enabling real time ray tracing. It is now a popular platform for developers of games, 3D applications, and VR/AR. In the past ray tracing was only found in non-real time applications. Video games had to rely on rasterization for their rendering. RTX made it development easier by generating interactive images that react to lighting, shadows and reflections. RTX runs on the NVIDIA Volta and Turing based GPU’s. specifically utilizing the Tensor Cores (new RT cores on Turing) on the architecture for ray tracing acceleration. NVIDIA announced in March 2019 that selected GTX -10 series (Pascal) and GTX 16 series (Turing) cards would receive subset of RTX Technology in upcoming drivers though ray tracing would be affected by lack of dedicated hardware cores.

next page: The future of Max, OTOY, game engines, RenderMan and more…

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This year the Exhibits Floor may look petite, but it doesn’t mean vendors aren’t around. Companies like Side FX, Autodesk, Chaos Group, Unity have opted to rent rooms at the convention center. Vendors can do presentations, panels and courses for three days in a much more intimate environment. You can focus on what you are trying to learn or adapt into your workflow without the distraction of other booths.

Keynote time at SIGGRAPH 2019. The event last week had many new key announcements which Architosh is covering below and in other reports.

Victoria Alonzo from Marvel Studios did the keynote presentation. She is a strong advocate for more women behind the screen in production roles in technology and other key roles.

Key Product and Company Announcements

Autodesk made the highly anticipated announcement about Bifrost for Maya. Bifrost is a new visual programming environment for Maya to do your own custom effects, publish and share with other artists across different shots, scenes and even shows. It comes with a ton of pre-built graphs to help you get started. Autodesk also announced the latest versions of Shotgun, Arnold, Flame and 3DS Max. Maya will provide Open Source support by integrating the USD Plug In.

Autodesk announced several new items at SIGGRAPH, including its support for Pixar’s new USD format. This year much of the action was in vendor suites in other rooms.

Maxon Cinema 4D announced Cinema 4D R21 Release. Maxon creates, “3D for the real world.”

Maxon’s booth shot between sessions on the show floor.

The new R21 release has tons of new features and enhancements. Redshift joins the Maxon family of products for their first SIGGRAPH together after Maxon announced acquiring Redshift at NAB. Maxon introduced a better way to manage your Maxon product license through “My Maxon” and makes it easier for you to use a license at work and later use it at home if you decide to finish a project on your own computer.  People cheered when Maxon revealed their new pricing strategy. $60 (49 Euros) a month for a 12- month license or $95 (85 Euros) a month single license. You can still get the Perpetual License for $3495. There is also a combo package of Cinema 4D with Redshift for an additional $20.

Paul Babb of Maxon, head of worldwide marketing. The company announced a new monthly pricing strategy.

KHRONOS released Open XR 1.0. Open XR will ship the API first and the Device Plugin Interface in the future. Open XR is a royalty free, open standard that provides high performance Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, the X in XR is the combination of the A in Augmented Reality and the V in Virtual. Developers frustrated with have to port their code to different headsets will find Open XR gives them a lot more freedom to create cross platform XR experiences. A third-party developer will bring Vulkan to the Mac OS. (see: Architosh, “SIG: Khronos Releases OpenXR 1.0 Spec—Establishes Foundation for AR/VR Ecosystem,” 29 July 2019).

next page: News on Houdini, Chaos Group, NVIDIA, Apple and more…

The post SIG: Siggraph 2019—Highlights from the Computer Graphics Show (Part 1) appeared first on Architosh.

Day 1

Monday was a beautiful day filled with sunshine as I listened to the Keynote Session featuring Victoria Alonzo, President of Production at Marvel Studios. She was discussing pipelines for visual effects (VFX) production and her first time meeting Katherine Kennedy.

An image from SIGGRAPH 2019 showing attendees in an overflow room watching the keynote talk.

In room 408 AB there are courses and panels on Advances in Real-Time Games, and this year at SIGGRAPH there are overflow rooms like the Geek Bar where you can tune into courses that are full using a headset they provide you. This is really helpful for attendees who can’t be everywhere at all times.

Apple at SIGGRAPH? Yup!

Apple has had Exhibitor Sessions including session titles like: “Modern Mobile Graphics on Metal” and “Apple Inc. Presents Introduction to Reality Kit.”

NVIDIA has a massive booth and presence at SIGGRAPH. On the docket for Day 1, I checked out AMD’s booth to see their next-generation graphics (GPUs) and CPU technologies. (more to come on that).

Look for larger reports on SIGGRAPH 2019 on Architosh shortly.

The post SIG: Early Impressions—And yes, Apple was at SIGGRAPH appeared first on Architosh.

Growth in Architects and Designers

Architect and designers with creative teams are putting together spatial experiences changing the way that people buy homes and plan cities. The effects of VR are not limited to just large design firms as smaller firms start to integrate VR/AR into their pipelines.

The session called “Architectural VR: The Hidden Giant, presented by Kilograph” at VRLA 2018 quoted a recent study that found that 50% of architectural firms are using VR or AR in their work and two-thirds were planning on doing VR work by 2019.  Architectural Visualization in VR is growing though not many people are talking about it.

Marc Petit, of Unreal Engine, did a presentation at SIGGRAPH last year and stated that architectural firms in Europe were adopting the Unreal Engine in their visualization including using it for VR/MR/AR. We discuss below some of these products for these pipelines with new hardware innovations in the space.

Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine is no longer just for gamers. It has become one of the most widely used tools for creating VR. Unreal Engine provides multiple options for importing architectural models, scenes, and textures using software packages like 3DS Max, Maya, Houdini, Cinema 4D and much more.

At the moment TwinMotion is one of the most widely used solutions for architects using ARCHICAD on the Mac and PC. Unreal Engine Online Learning content is split into several tracks: Game Development, Architecture, Industrial Design, and Media & Entertainment. “Content” is also sorted by job roles and engine features. There are videos available anytime, on demand.

Firms who are buying Apple iMac Pros want to know all the options available to them for creating visualization and VR. These are a few, but more are coming every day.

Maxon

Maxon recently released version 20 of Cinema 4D with key highlights including:

• Node-Based Materials — providing possibilities for creating materials from simple references to complex shaders in node-based editors.
• New capabilities in MoGraph Fields; CAD Data Import can be seamlessly imported into Cinema 4D R20.
• Volume Modeling — used to create complex models by adding and subtracting basic shapes in Boolean-type operations.
• ProRender Enhancements in Cinema 4D R20 extends the GPU rendering toolsets with key features sub-surface scattering, motion blur, and multi-passes.
• Core Technology Modernization with substantial API enhancements.

I asked Paul Babb, President of Maxon USA, what the iMac Pro pipeline would look like for architects who want to do VR using an option without TwinMotion.

01 – The Maxon CINEMA 4D to Unreal Pipeline involves a new plugin from Maxon.

“TwinMotion is not the only way to get C4D assets into Unreal, there are many methods, including the [Maxon] Cineversity plugin we released early this year. However, a seamless workflow from Cinema 4D into the Unreal engine is certainly something that is of great interest to Maxon. I cannot comment on the progress of that effort, but it is a high priority. There are many solutions to work with C4D into Unreal. It is our goal to make that workflow even easier.”

02 – Maxon booth at show floor in Vancouver. (image: Vicky Gray Clark, Ambient PR / Architosh. All rights reserved)

03 – Paul Babb, CEO of Maxon, speaking at the press luncheon. (image: Vicky Gray Clark, Ambient PR / Architosh. All rights reserved)

I think Cinema 4D R20 is one most reliable software packages to consider when you are considering doing architectural visualization and VR/AR interactive presentations.

Chaos Group

Chaos Group previewed Lavina using Microsoft DXR to deliver 3 to 5 times faster ray-tracing performance over Volta generation with scenes imported from Autodesk Maya or 3DSMax. Chaos Group also has an option for exporting a V-Ray scene file from any V-Ray product of your choice into V-Ray for Unreal.

04 – ARCHICAD to Unreal pipeline, by way of V-Ray for Unreal.

Chaos Group says, “V-Ray lights and materials will be automatically converted into real-time equivalents, and your original V-Ray assignments are maintained so you can still access V-Ray from within Unreal. Once you’re in Unreal, you can navigate in real time, and you can also render fully ray traced V-Ray images.” You can export V-Ray scene files from Maya, Houdini, and SketchUp on the iMac Pro right into Unreal. V-Ray for Maya, beta 2 is now available as is V-Ray for Houdini Beta.

05 – V-Ray Days presentation. (image: Colin McLaughlin, Liaison PR / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Chaos Group also notes, “For Mac users that are using V-Ray for Maya, Houdini or SketchUp, they can freely access the beta of V-Ray Cloud and try free cloud rendering for a limited time.”

next page: OTOY, Allegorithmic, Nvidia, Autodesk and Closing Comments

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There was a big focus on interactivity with clients and how to have so many different offices in several countries to operate as one firm. I think it’s important to be aware of how these technologies work as they change how we think about platforms, servers, and real-time collaboration.  There were many conversations about rendering on the GPU and how this is giving us access to new technology that facilitates real-time visualization. NVIDIA’s Denoiser gives you a great quality render in 1 or 2 passes instead of 8 or 16 by using AI to predict what it should be.

The role of AI and Deep Learning in pipelines can help us learn how data is used in a way that gives designers information about how rooms should be designed in an apartment building. VDI is connecting large firms who have offices all over the world; latency issues improve with VMWare and Citrix keeping competitive with updates and a faster worldwide web. Holodeck VR by NVIDIA is changing how VR is being utilized by creating a collaborative environment where architects, engineers, and clients can all interact in real time in a VR walk-through. GPU servers like the DGX-2 are creating smaller footprints for racked workstations by providing GPU power in a 350-pound box with 2 PFLOPS of power.

I wanted to go through some of these panels as the technological tools these firms are using, illustrates how much technology is changing and how powerful the new tools are.

The Future of Real-Time Experience Design

Epic Games presented a speaker panel to discuss the use of the Unreal Engine with partners using UE for high fidelity, interactive experiences for their customers. Owen Coffee from HKS presented their design of the new Texas Rangers Stadium “Globe Life Field” using the Unreal Engine. (image 01) Real-time models from Revit, Rhino and 3ds Max files were imported into the Unreal Engine and Lumion.

01 – Owen Coffee of HKS was talking about Unreal Engine in their pipeline. (image: Akiko Ashley/ Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Proprietary HKS developments enhanced the Unreal models, including a real-time crowd of 40,000 fans. Re-importation of design elements updates via large Revit-based data sets was a complex process where proprietary scripting in 3ds Max streamlined the process. On the screen, Owen Coffee was able to show how the camera moved through the model without latency even with all the fans in their seats. The Unreal Engine was also able to handle surrounding buildings including the stadium next door. (see image 02)

02 – Globe Life Field in Unreal Engine. (image: Akiko Ashley / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

The Unreal Engine does run on the Mac, and if you connect your Mac to a virtual desktop environment (VDI), you have access to many of these tools.

next page: Designing Human-Centric Spaces with Holodeck VR and Machine Learning

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CannonDesign’s recent projects include UC San Diego Health, Jacobs Medical Center, the University of Utah’s Lassonde Studios, the Centre Hospitalier de l’universite de Montreal (CHUM—the largest current P3 project in North America), workplaces for Uber, CJ Corporation’s Only One R&D Center and countless others. The firm can operate as a single team across 23 offices around the world using multiple technologies we will talk about today.

01 – Jimmy Rotella and Ernesto Pacheco from CannonDesign doing a presentation at the 2018 GTC. (image: Akiko Ashley / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Jimmy Rotella and Ernesto Pacheco from CannonDesign share a brief look at the CannonDesign pipeline, the subjects of which were in their presentation at this year’s NVIDIA GTC 2018 conference.

The Interview

(Akiko Ashley) Can you tell me a little about your role in CannonDesign?

(Jimmy) I’m the Digital Practice Director for the firm. I usually explain the Digital Practice group as the intersection of technology and design for our company. I lead and oversee design technology-related efforts which range from managing the software we use, vetting new software, developing processes and workflows to use our tools, teaching people best practices, and exploring new technologies. My role touches a lot of things throughout the entire company, and because it’s so far-reaching I have to work closely with a lot of people to coordinate our efforts and make sure everything works together.

(Ernesto) I’m the Design Visualization Lead at CannonDesign. I’m responsible for the research and implementation of new technologies and software into our visualization workflow. Lately, I have been heavily involved with the development of VR and AR experience for job interviews and design meetings. I’m currently directing our rendering an animation efforts firm-wide.

Do you use the NVIDIA graphics cards in your pipeline and is it on the user’s machine or built into your server farm?

(Jimmy) We have a lot of different workflows and pipelines, hence we require multiple solutions to facilitate them; however, almost all of them are heavily reliant on graphics power and utilize NVIDIA graphics. The majority of our designers leverage our virtual desktop infrastructure as their everyday workstations, and they are powered by Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation technology (formerly known as GRID). This gives them the power they need, along with the flexibility to work anywhere, and we get much better management capabilities when compared to a desktop environment. 

Our other solution is designed for our high-end graphics users who are also working with virtual reality on a regular basis. These end users work on physical desktops powered by NVIDIA Quadro cards. Because of the latency requirements of today’s VR headsets, we can’t yet use that technology on our VDI’s, so physical workstations are our only option for any virtual reality solutions.

(Ernesto) We use NVIDIA graphics cards exclusively both on local machines as well as on our server farm.

When did CannonDesign implement a VDI solution and what were some of the obstacles along the way?

(Jimmy) Our initial implementation was around 2007, but we were fully virtualized by 2011. Our upgrade and build-out of our new data center—which our talk centers around—was in 2015. The biggest obstacle was testing and making sure the solution provided a good experience for our end users in their design workflows. In our early implementation, virtual desktop solutions were not tailored to graphics-intensive workflows, but rather suited to traditional “office task work.” We had to prove this solution would work for our design tools also.

How long have you used the Holodeck VR and have you used it on a project yet? 

(Ernesto) We have been involved with the development of tools geared towards AEC with NVIDIA since the early access build of Holodeck. We have used it on internal projects only.

What would you like to see in the Holodeck VR software to help you better?

(Ernesto) Better navigation tools tailored for architectural visualization.

02 – CannonDesign presentation at 2018 GTC on the NVIDIA Holodeck VR software solution. (image: Akiko Ashley / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

(Jimmy) Not sure how much detail we can go into regarding this, but the main thing we addressed in our presentation was the need to streamline the import process into the Holodeck from 3d modeling platforms.

Do you think VR, AR, or MR will be first to become familiar in the marketplace? And why do you think this?

(Jimmy) Honestly, I think they are all already becoming familiar in the marketplace. Right now each serves different purposes and leverages different platforms, therefore they are all being used and experimented with in the marketplace. In my opinion, I think a much more advanced form of AR is where we are going to end up, just because I think it’s the most flexible and will have the broadest application to people’s everyday lives. However, we’re not going to get there until the hardware associated with it is more similar to an everyday pair of glasses.

(Ernesto) AR is widely used by consumers nowadays and I think it will only continue to get better. IKEA is the best example of the leverage of this technology via their app. MR will most likely take on once HMDs become lighter and fashionable.

Can you tell me what key hardware you use and can’t live without, and your key software packages?

(Jimmy) Our virtual infrastructure is a very important part of our workflows. Without that, we would not be able to accomplish our SFMO (single firm, multi-office) model. It really is what allows us to collaborate on projects regardless of location and at a level that would be otherwise impossible.

As for key software packages, our primary authoring tool is Revit. That’s really what we use to create our construction documents and models, which at the end of the day, is what we are getting paid for.

(Ernesto) I have a Cintiq Wacom tablet that I use for post-processing tasks in Photoshop and After Effects as well as 3D modeling. My key software packages are 3dsmax, Modo, and Unreal Engine

Can you tell us briefly how CannonDesign starts a project and where does it enter the technology pipeline and what happens next?

(Jimmy) Most of our projects still start as sketches and ideas. Sometimes those are captures in analog on trace paper or drawings, but sometimes they start directly in the technology pipeline via digital sketches.

After that, they often move into more of a schematic phase, where those digital or analog sketches are recreated in 3d masses in programs like Rhino, Sketchup, or sometimes directly in Revit to be further developed.

Can you talk about key a project or projects and how you use technology to accomplish getting them done more efficiently?

(Jimmy)  Last summer we were approached by one of our design leaders with a task given to him by the USI Athletic Director, John Mark Hall. The task was to have CannonDesign deliver a virtual reality tour of the proposed arena to their current and potential corporate donors during a dinner event. He also had requested a 2-minute walkthrough animation for use in future articles on the arena as well as for social media. We planned the presentation to be led by one of our design leaders with a surprise guest appearance by one of the USI basketball stars.

03 – Jimmy Rotella and Ernesto Pacheco from CannonDesign presenting at 2018 GTC. (image: Akiko Ashley / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

The task was nothing less than monumental as we were given only a month and a half to put all of this together. We had developed a couple of VR experiences with the Oculus Rift before. However, this time we had to develop the project using the HTC Vive, which presented a new set of challenges. Having access to the right software and assets allowed us to expedite most of the initial tasks. This was true especially during UV mapping as this project required a huge amount of costume environmental graphics on walls, floors, ceilings, and even glass.

At the end of the event, the Athletic Director thanked us for all the work and was very excited to share the animation and video of the presentation with others. He also saw the potential for this type of technology as a recruiting tool. Eventually, he requested a lighter mobile deployment of the VR experience that he could take with him to recruiting events.

Thank you Jimmy and Ernesto for this wonderful conversation. What a brilliant group of talent you have at CannonDesign.

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