Nvidia has just expanded 3D design collaboration into a new universe, or more specifically, into the Omniverse.
At GTC 2019, Nvidia turned 3D content creation workflow on its head with Omniverse, connecting artists and tools. Omniverse is an open collaboration platform that enables teams of artists to work together interactively using standard 2D and 3D tools such as Maya, Photoshop, or Unreal Engine for live editing and viewing. The teams can be from different locales of a studio, or from different companies entirely. And, they can be using different tools. The work will be seen in a live preview window within Omniverse Viewer.
Omniverse supports Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD) technology for exchanging information about modeling, shading, animation, lighting, visual effects, and rendering across multiple applications. It also supports Nvidia’s Material Definition Language, which allows artists to exchange information about surface materials across multiple tools.
“When we opened-sourced USD, our goal was to make it easier to combine complex characters and environments into a single scene. Omniverse raises the bar, leveraging USD to enable scalable, real-time collaborative workflows across some of the industry’s major software packages,” said Guido Quaroni, vice president of software at Pixar.
With Omniverse, artists can see live updates made by other artists working in different applications. They can also see changes reflected in multiple tools at the same time. For example, an artist using Maya with a portal to Omniverse can collaborate with another artist using UE4, and both will see real-time updates of each other’s changes in their application.
Nvidia is accepting applications for its Omniverse lighthouse program.