Omniverse running on NVIDIA EGX AI platform and NVIDIA Virtual Workstation software delivers enhanced content creation and real-time collaboration to film and television.
There are major shifts happening in the media and entertainment industry.
With the rise of streaming services, there’s a growing demand for high-quality programming and an increasing need for fresh content to satisfy hundreds of millions of subscribers.
At the same time, teams are often collaborating on complex assets using multiple applications while working from different geographic locations. New pipelines are emerging and post-production workflows are being integrated earlier into processes, boosting the need for real-time collaboration.
By extending our Omniverse 3D simulation and collaboration platform to run on the NVIDIA EGX AI platform, NVIDIA is making it even easier for artists, designers, technologists and other creative professionals to accelerate workflows for productions — from asset creation to live on-set collaboration.
The EGX platform leverages the power of NVIDIA RTX GPUs, NVIDIA Virtual Data Center Workstation software, and NVIDIA Omniverse to fundamentally transform the collaborative process during digital content creation and virtual production.
Professionals and studios around the world can use this combination to lower costs, boost creativity across applications and teams, and accelerate production workflows.
Driving Real-Time Collaboration, Increased Interactivity
The NVIDIA EGX platform delivers the power of the NVIDIA Ampere architecture on a range of validated servers and devices. A vast ecosystem of partners offer EGX through their products and services. Professional creatives can use these to achieve the most significant advancements in computer graphics to accelerate their film and television content creation pipelines.
To support third-party digital content creation applications, Omniverse Connect libraries are distributed as plugins that enable client applications to connect to Omniverse Nucleus and to publish and subscribe to individual assets and full worlds. Supported applications for common film and TV content creation pipelines include Epic Games Unreal Engine, Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, SideFX Houdini, Adobe Photoshop, Substance Painter by Adobe, and Unity.
NVIDIA Virtual Workstation software provides the most powerful virtual workstations from the data center or cloud to any device, anywhere. IT departments can virtualize any application from the data center with a native workstation user experience, while eliminating constrained workflows and flexibly scaling GPU resources.
Studios can optimize their infrastructure by efficiently centralizing applications and data. This dramatically reduces IT operating expenses and allows companies to focus IT resources on managing strategic projects instead of individual workstations — all while enabling a more flexible, remote real-time environment with stronger data security.
With NVIDIA Omniverse, creative teams have the ability to deliver real-time results by creating, iterating and collaborating on the same assets while using a variety of applications. Omniverse powered by the EGX platform and NVIDIA Virtual Workstation allows artists to focus on creating high-quality content without waiting for long render times.
“Real-time ray tracing massive datasets in a remote workstation environment is finally possible with the new RTX A6000, HP ZCentral and NVIDIA’s Omniverse,” said Chris Eckardt, creative director and CG supervisor at Framestore.
Elevating Content Creation Across the World
During content creation, artists need to design and iterate quickly on assets, while collaborating with remote teams and other studios working on the same productions. With Omniverse running on the NVIDIA EGX platform, users can access the power of a high-end virtual workstation to rapidly create, iterate and present compelling renders using their preferred application.
Creative professionals can quickly combine terrain from one shot with characters from another without removing any data, which drives more efficient collaboration. Teams can communicate their designs more effectively by sharing high-fidelity ray-traced models with one click, so colleagues or clients can view the assets on a phone, tablet or in a browser. Along with the ability to mark up models in Omniverse, this accelerates the decision-making process and reduces design review cycles to help keep projects on track.
Taking Virtual Productions to the Next Level
With more film and TV projects using new virtual production techniques, studios are under immense pressure to iterate as quickly as possible to keep the cameras rolling. With in-camera VFX, the concept of fixing it in post-production has moved to fixing it all on set.
With the NVIDIA EGX platform and NVIDIA Virtual Workstations running Omniverse, users gain access to secure, up-to-date datasets from any device, ensuring they maintain productivity when working live on set.
Artists achieve a smooth experience with Unreal Engine, Maya, Substance Painter and other apps to quickly create and iterate on scene files while the interoperability of these software tools in Omniverse improves collaboration. Teams can instantly view photorealistic renderings of their model with the RTX Renderer so that they rapidly assess options for the most compelling images.
This article by Rick Champagne was originally published on the NVIDIA blog.