NVIDIA's Latest Advancements Revolutionize 3D Content Creation
Cutting-edge AI technologies are transforming the landscape of 3D content creation. These advancements range from imbuing characters with realistic emotions to converting text into dynamic imagery. The NVIDIA GTC is currently underway, offering a global, complimentary conference focused on AI and the metaverse. During the event, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang unveiled several new advancements. We’ll start with a brief overview and then discuss each advancement more thoroughly.
Highlights
- First we saw the Omniverse Audio2Face app that employs generative AI to streamline workflows for creators.
- The NVIDIA Omniverse platform, designed for developing and operating metaverse applications, has expanded with the updated Unreal Engine Connector, open-beta Unity Connector, and SimReady 3D assets.
- The latest NVIDIA RTX GPUs, powered by the Ada Lovelace architecture, are driving next-generation laptop and desktop workstations to meet the needs of AI, design, and industrial metaverse applications.
- The NVIDIA Studio Driver for March includes support for the RTX Video Super Resolution feature, which is now available for GeForce RTX 40 and 30 Series GPUs.
- Finally, the Adobe Substance 3D art and development team will demonstrate the collaborative process of creating the animated short End of Summer using Omniverse USD Composer (formerly known as Create) this week in the NVIDIA Studio.
Omniverse Overdrive
Utilizing specialized generative AI tools can significantly enhance productivity for creators, even those without extensive technical expertise. By leveraging generative AI, innovative ideas can be transformed into high-quality, iterative experiences in a fraction of the time and cost of traditional asset development. The Omniverse Audio2Face app, powered by AI, is a prime example of this technology at work. With this app, 3D artists can easily animate secondary characters by generating realistic facial animations from a single audio file, eliminating the need for a tedious, manual process.
The newest version of the Omniverse Audio2Face app boasts significant upgrades in quality, usability, and performance, including a new headless mode and REST API. These advancements enable game developers and other creators to process multiple audio files from numerous users in the data center with ease.
NVIDIA has also released a new Omniverse Connector for Unity workflows, now available in open beta. This connector enables Unity scenes to be added directly onto Omniverse Nucleus servers, providing access to various platform features, including the DeepSearch tool, thumbnails, bookmarks, and more. Unidirectional live-sync workflows allow for real-time updates.
In addition, Omniverse users can now utilize Unreal Engine’s USD import utilities through the latest version of the Unreal Engine Connector. This release also includes updates to software development kits and improvements in import, export, and live workflows. The connector also adds skeletal mesh blend shape importing and Python USD bindings to access stages on Omniverse Nucleus.
Moreover, creators can now access over 1,000 new SimReady assets built to real-world scale, with accurate mass, physical materials, and center of gravity for use within Omniverse PhysX, providing the most photorealistic visuals and accurate movements.
NVIDIA Studio Driver for March
It has been observed that more than 90% of online videos consumed by NVIDIA RTX GPU owners are limited to 1080p resolution or lower, which often results in upscaling that further degrades the picture quality, despite the hardware being capable of supporting higher resolutions.
To address this issue, NVIDIA has introduced a new feature called RTX Video Super Resolution. This feature is now available on GeForce RTX 30 and 40 Series GPUs and utilizes AI to enhance the quality of any video streamed through Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers. With this technology, users can now enjoy superior video quality and improved visual details, making for a more immersive viewing experience.
By utilizing the RTX Video Super Resolution feature, users can improve the sharpness and clarity of online video content. This technology allows users to watch online videos in their native resolution, even on high-resolution displays.
Revolutionary NVIDIA RTX GPUs
NVIDIA has recently unveiled a series of six new professional-grade RTX GPUs, all of which are built using the Ada Lovelace architecture. These cutting-edge GPUs are designed to provide creators with the power and performance needed to tackle even the most complex workloads using either laptops or desktops.
The new range of Ada Generation laptop GPUs includes the NVIDIA RTX 5000, RTX 4000, RTX 3500, RTX 3000, and RTX 2000 models, all of which offer up to twice the performance of the previous generation.
In addition, the NVIDIA RTX 4000 Small Form Factor (SFF) Ada Generation desktop GPU features new RT Cores, Tensor Cores, and CUDA cores, along with up to 20GB of graphics memory. These advanced features provide creators with powerful tools to take on their most demanding workloads, enabling them to produce high-quality content with greater efficiency and speed.
Related: How to update video card drivers in Windows 11
End of Summer
The Adobe Substance 3D art and development team's short animation, End of Summer, is surprisingly heartfelt, as intended by the team. According to team member Wes McDermott, the team aimed to create artwork that would evoke emotions in the viewer and enable them to develop their own version of a story unfolding before their eyes. End of Summer is a tribute to stop-motion animation studios like Laika and started as an internal project within Adobe Substance 3D with two main goals in mind.
The first goal was to encourage a relatively new team of artists to collaborate and work together on a creative project. The second goal was to test the pipeline feature set for the potential of the Universal Scene Description (USD) framework.
In order to create assets for the project, the team distributed the tasks among the most popular 3D applications, such as Adobe Substance 3D Modeler, Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, Blender, and Maxon’s Cinema 4D. The use of their GeForce RTX GPUs allowed the team to take advantage of AI denoising in the viewport, resulting in fast and interactive rendering. Additionally, the team utilized GPU-accelerated filters to simplify and expedite material creation.
NVIDIA continues to revolutionize the digital entertainment landscape
NVIDIA has made significant progress in AI technology and hardware, resulting in revolutionary advancements like the RTX Video Super Resolution and the new RTX GPUs based on the Ada Lovelace architecture, which have had a profound impact on 3D content creation. By using the NVIDIA Omniverse platform and its connectors, creators can now produce high-quality content with greater efficiency, even for more complex workloads.
The short animation End of Summer, created by the Adobe Substance 3D team, showcases the power of NVIDIA's GPUs, which allowed for streamlined, AI denoised rendering and GPU-accelerated filters to facilitate the creative process. With these cutting-edge tools available, creators can bring their ideas to life more easily and effectively, driving innovation and pushing the limits of what's possible in the realm of 3D content creation.
