DataBloomNVIDIA AI tools are enabling deep learning-powered performance capture for creators at every level: visual effects and animation studios, creative professionals — even any enthusiast with a camera. With NVIDIA Vid2Vid Cameo, creators can harness AI to capture their facial movements and expressions from any standard 2D video taken with a professional camera or smartphone. Read article >
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In a swift, eye-popping special address at SIGGRAPH, NVIDIA execs described the forces driving the next era in graphics, and the company’s expanding range of tools to accelerate them. “The combination of AI and computer graphics will power the metaverse, the next evolution of the internet,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, kicking Read article >
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A glimpse into the future of AI-infused virtual worlds was on display at SIGGRAPH — the world’s largest gathering of computer graphics experts — as NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang put the finishing touches on the company’s special address.
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Over the past few decades, the Internet has fundamentally changed the world and set in motion an enormous transformation in the way we consume and share…
Over the past few decades, the Internet has fundamentally changed the world and set in motion an enormous transformation in the way we consume and share information. The transformation is so complete that today, a quality web presence is vital for nearly all businesses, and interacting with the web is central to functioning effectively in the modern world.
The web has evolved from static documents to dynamic applications involving rich interactive media. Yet despite the fact that we live in a 3D world, the web remains overwhelmingly two-dimensional.
Now we find ourselves at the threshold of the web’s next major advancement: the advent of the 3D Internet or metaverse. Instead of linking together 2D pages, the metaverse will link together virtual worlds. Websites will become interconnected 3D spaces akin to the world we live in and experience every day.
Many of these virtual worlds will be digital twins reflecting the real world, linked and synchronized in real time. Others will be designed for entertainment, socializing, gaming, learning, collaboration, or commerce.
No matter what the purpose of any individual site, what will make the entire metaverse a success will be the same thing that has made the 2D web so successful: universal interoperability based on open standards and protocols.
The most fundamental standard needed to create the metaverse is the description of a virtual world. At NVIDIA, we believe the first version of that standard already exists. It is Universal Scene Description (USD) — an open and extensible body of software for describing 3D worlds that was originally developed by Pixar to enable their complex animated film production workflows.
Open sourced in 2015, USD is now being used in a wide range of industries not only in media and entertainment, but also spanning architecture, engineering, design, manufacturing, retail, scientific computing, and robotics, among others.
USD is a scene description: a set of data structures and APIs to create, represent, and modify virtual worlds. The representation is rich. It supports not only the basics of virtual worlds like geometry, cameras, lights, and materials, but also a wide variety of relationships among them, including property inheritance, instancing and specialization.
It includes features necessary for scaling to large data sets like lazy loading and efficient retrieval of time-sampled data. It is tremendously extensible, allowing users to customize data schemas, input and output formats, and methods for finding assets. In short, USD covers the very broad range of requirements that Pixar found necessary to make its feature films.
Layers are probably the single most innovative feature of USD. Conceptually, they have some similarities to layers in Adobe Photoshop: the final composite is the result of combining the effects of all the layers in order. But instead of modifying the pixels of an image like Photoshop layers, USD layers modify the properties of the composed scene. Most importantly, they provide a powerful mechanism for collaboration.
Different users can modify the composed scene on different layers, and their edits will be non-destructive. The stronger layer will win out in the composition, but the data from the weaker layer remains accessible. Beyond direct collaboration, the ability that layers provide to non-destructively modify what others have done enables the kind of composability that has made the traditional web so successful.
NVIDIA believes that USD should serve as the HTML of the metaverse: the declarative specification of the contents of a web site. But just as HTML evolved from the limited static documents of HTML 1 to the dynamic applications of HTML 5, it is clear that USD will need to evolve to meet the needs of the metaverse. To accelerate this evolution, NVIDIA has already made a number of additions to the USD ecosystem:
In the short term, NVIDIA is developing:
In the longer term, NVIDIA is working with partners to fill some of the larger remaining gaps in USD:
Companies across industrial and manufacturing—including Ericsson, Kroger, and Volvo—are adopting USD to enable their 3D virtual worlds and asset projects.
NVIDIA Omniverse is a scalable computing platform for full-design-fidelity 3D simulation workflows and a toolkit for building USD-based metaverse applications. Omniverse was built from the ground up as a USD engine and open toolkit for building custom, interoperable 3D pipelines.
You can access a wealth of USD resources from NVIDIA, available online for free. A good place to start is with NVIDIA’s hub of USD resources. To learn the basics of USD with examples in USDA and Python in a step-by-step web tutorial, sign up for the USD DLI course.
Experimenting with USD is easy with precompiled USD binaries. These Windows/Linux distributions will help you get started developing tools that take advantage of USD or start using USDView from Omniverse Launcher. For Python developers, the easiest way to start reading and writing USD layers is with the usd-core Python Package.
If you’re looking for USD sample data, numerous sample USD scenes are available, including a physics-based marbles mini-game sample and an attic scene with MDL materials rendered in Omniverse. In addition, USD SimReady Content includes component models from various industries prepared for simulation workflows.
Learn more in the Omniverse Resource Center, which details how developers can build custom USD-based applications and extensions for the platform.
Follow Omniverse on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Medium for additional resources and inspiration. Check out the Omniverse forums and join our Discord Server and Twitch to chat with the community.
Enter the NVIDIA #ExtendOmniverse contest with an extension created in Omniverse Code for a chance to win an NVIDIA RTX GPU. Join NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH 2022 to learn more about the latest Omniverse announcements and watch the Special Address on demand. And don’t miss the global premiere of the documentary, The Art of Collaboration: NVIDIA, Omniverse, and GTC on August 10 at 10 AM, Pacific time.
NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH 2022 today announced the full open sourcing of Material Definition Language (MDL)—including the MDL Distiller and GLSL backend…
NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH 2022 today announced the full open sourcing of Material Definition Language (MDL)—including the MDL Distiller and GLSL backend technologies—to further expand the MDL ecosystem.
Building the world’s most accurate and scalable models for material and rendering simulation is a continuous effort, requiring flexibility and adaptability. MDL is NVIDIA’s vision for renderer algorithm-agnostic material definitions for material exchange.
MDL unlocks material representations from current siloes, allowing them to traverse software ecosystems. It can be used to define complex, physically-accurate materials by reducing material complexity to boost performance.
NVIDIA is open sourcing the MDL Distiller to enable best-in-class implementations of MDL support for all kinds of renderers. Built as a companion technology to the MDL SDK and language, the Distiller is a fully automated solution to simplify all MDL materials to a reduced material model of a simpler renderer. As a renderer developer, you can now provide respective MDL Distiller rules, rather than material artists providing simpler materials for simple renderers.
MDL can now be used to author one high-quality, single-truth material without the need to make compromises or variants for lesser-capable renderers. Approximations and simplifications are left to the software. Once a renderer improves the capabilities, for example, the MDL Distiller rules can be upgraded and the old materials improve without the need to re-author the content.
New open source GLSL backend technologies provide MDL support to renderer developers building on OpenGL or Vulkan, closing the gap to established graphics API standards. The MDL Distiller and GLSL backend will enable many more developers to leverage the power of MDL.
By unlocking material representations, artists have the freedom to work across ecosystems while maintaining material appearance. This means a material can be created once and then shared across multiple applications.
The ability to share physically-based materials between supporting applications, coupled with the flexibility of use in renderers and platforms like NVIDIA Omniverse, is a key advantage of MDL. This flexibility saves time and effort in many workflows and pipelines.
Learn more about NVIDIA MDL and download the SDK to get started.
Watch the NVIDIA Special Address at SIGGRAPH 2022 on demand, and join NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH to see more of the latest technology breakthroughs in graphics, AI, and virtual worlds.
NVIDIA today announced a broad initiative to evolve Universal Scene Description (USD), the open-source and extensible language of 3D worlds, to become a foundation of the open metaverse and 3D internet.
NVIDIA today announced NeuralVDB, which brings the power of AI to OpenVDB, the industry-standard library for simulating and rendering sparse volumetric data, such as water, fire, smoke and clouds. Building on the past decade’s development of OpenVDB, the introduction at SIGGRAPH of NeuralVDB is a game-changer for professionals working in areas like scientific computing and Read article >
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The creation of 3D objects for building scenes for games, virtual worlds including the metaverse, product design or visual effects is traditionally a meticulous process, where skilled artists balance detail and photorealism against deadlines and budget pressures. It takes a long time to make something that looks and acts as it would in the physical Read article >
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NVIDIA today announced a new range of developer frameworks, tools, apps and plugins for NVIDIA Omniverse™, the platform for building and connecting metaverse worlds based on Universal Scene Description (USD).
NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), a suite of cloud-native AI models and services that make it easier to build and customize lifelike virtual assistants and digital humans.