January 4, 2022 – NVIDIA has today announced at CES 2022 that its Omniverse platform is now available for free to millions of individual NVIDIA Studio creators using GeForce RTX and NVIDIA RTX GPUs. In a special address at CES, NVIDIA also announced new platform developments for Omniverse Machinima and Omniverse Audio2Face, new platform features like Nucleus Cloud and 3D marketplaces, as well as ecosystem updates.
Omniverse is NVIDIA’s real-time 3D design collaboration and virtual world simulation platform, designed to be the foundation that connects virtual worlds by bringing graphics, AI, simulation and scalable compute together into a single platform. With Ominverse, artists, designers and creators can use leading design applications to create 3D assets and scenes from a laptop or workstation.
“With this technology, content creators get more than just a fast renderer,” said Zhelong Xu, a digital artist and Omniverse Creator based in Shanghai. “NVIDIA Omniverse and RTX give artists a powerful platform with infinite possibilities.”
According to NVIDIA, since the open beta launch of Ominverse a year ago, the platform has been downloaded by almost 100,000 creators who are accelerating their workflows with the platform’s core rendering, physics and AI technologies, and building interconnected 3D virtual worlds for commerce, entertainment, creativity and industry.
NVIDIA’s vision of the metaverse is one where these virtual worlds will be populated with shops, homes, people, robots, factories, museums — a staggering amount of 3D content. The company added that this content is challenging to produce, typically requiring multiple, often incompatible tools. Omniverse therefore connects these independent 3D design worlds into a shared virtual scene.
Omniverse Enterprise, the paid subscription for professional teams, was made available at GTC in November and is sold by NVIDIA’s global partner network. Today’s announcement from CES will now bring Omniverse capabilities into the hands of individual creators.
New features within Omniverse include:
- Omniverse Nucleus Cloud enables “one-click-to-collaborate” simple sharing of large Omniverse 3D scenes, meaning artists can collaborate from across the room or the globe without transferring massive datasets. Changes made by the artist are reflected back to the client — like working on a cloud-shared document — but for a 3D scene;
- New support for the Omniverse ecosystem provided by 3D marketplaces and digital asset libraries will make it easy for creators to build their scenes. TurboSquid by Shutterstock, CGTrader, Sketchfab and Twinbru have released thousands of Omniverse-ready assets for creators, all based on Universal Scene Description (USD) format, and are found directly in the Omniverse Launcher. Reallusion’s ActorCore, Daz3D and e-on software’s PlantCatalog will soon release their own Omniverse-ready assets as well, according to NVIDIA;
- Omniverse Machinima for RTX creators who love to game — now featuring new, free characters, objects and environments from leading game titles like Mechwarrior 5 and Shadow Warrior 3, plus Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord and Squad assets in the Machinima library. Creators can remix and recreate their own game cinematics with these assets by dragging and dropping them into their scenes;
- Omniverse Audio2Face, an AI-enabled app that instantly animates a 3D face with just an audio track, now offers blendshape support and direct export to Epic’s MetaHuman Creator app.
Above: An example of the Audio2Face app for 3D face speech animation.
Finally, the NVIDIA Omniverse ecosystem is also expanding with new Omniverse Connectors, extensions and asset libraries. Today, there are 14 connectors to applications like Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, with NVIDIA stating there are many more in the pipeline, including an Adobe Substance 3D Material Extension coming soon.
The latest Omniverse Connectors, extensions, and asset libraries that have been integrated into Omniverse to help streamline the design and creation process for users include:
- VUE, PlantFactory and PlantCatalog from e-on software, all of which allow users to create or model digital 3D nature, vegetation and plants respectively;
- Twinbru, a “digital twin of physical fabric” provider that supplies interior and exterior furnishing fabrics for drapery, sheers, curtains and upholstery applications.
Creators can download NVIDIA Omniverse for free here. For more information on NVIDIA and its Omniverse platform, please visit the company’s website.
Image / video credit: NVIDIA / YouTube
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Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.