NVIDIA Omniverse is a powerful, multi-GPU, real-time simulation and collaboration platform for 3D production pipelines based on Pixar’s Universal Scene Description and NVIDIA RTX. For digital artists, the Omniverse possesses similar functionality to the Git collaboration platform so favoured by software developers today.
USD is much more than a file format, it is a rich scene representation with an API that enables complex property inheritance, instancing, layering, lazy loading and a wide variety of other key features. Omniverse uses USD for interchange through the Nucleus DB service.
Omniverse features
- Live collaboration between 3D applications and users
- Collaborate live between your favourite applications using USD and MDL
- Real-time multi-GPU Ray Traced Viewport
- Enable real-time high quality multi-GPU ray tracing and path tracing on USD content
- Simulation
- High performance simulation of complex 3D physical worlds leveraging the latest in NVIDIA technology.
Materials in Omniverse are represented by NVIDIA’s open-source MDL (Material Definition Language). NVIDIA has developed a custom schema in USD to represent material assignments and parameters allowing for easy interchange between different application-specific material definitions. This standard definition enables materials to look similar if not identical across multiple applications.
In the YouTube video above, three different artists using three different tools collaborate remotely to build a virtual world as part of a single Omniverse project. Changes made by one artist are immediately visible to the other two, regardless of which application they are using.