Enriching its game developer ecosystem, NVIDIA today announced the launch of new NVIDIA Omniverse features that make it easier for developers to share assets, sort asset libraries, collaborate and deploy AI to animate characters’ facial expressions in a new game development pipeline.
With the NVIDIA Omniverse real-time design collaboration and simulation platform, game developers can use AI- and NVIDIA RTX-enabled tools, or easily build custom ones, to streamline, accelerate and enhance their development workflows. New features for game developers include updates to Omniverse Audio2Face, Omniverse Nucleus Cloud and Omniverse DeepSearch, as well as the introduction of Unreal Engine 5 Omniverse Connector.
“Omniverse provides a powerful development pipeline that addresses the challenges of doing business in today’s world,” said Frank DeLise, vice president of Omniverse at NVIDIA. “Its ability to unify artists, art, tools and applications under a single platform can inspire collaboration among even the most dispersed game development organization.”
A Powerful, More Collaborative Game Creation Environment
Game development pipelines are becoming increasingly complex as artists and designers work to exceed gamers’ expectations for enormous, immersive worlds. Global teams of artists work to build massive libraries of 3D content — a labour-intensive, time-consuming process made more challenging when incorporating realistic lighting, life-like physics and AI-powered technologies.
Omniverse addresses these challenges and helps game developers build photorealistic, physically accurate games more seamlessly by connecting artists, their assets, and software tools in one powerful platform. The collaborative aspect of Omniverse can dramatically decrease iteration time on critical design decisions, expediting project completion.
Omniverse is a multi-GPU-enabled open platform for 3D design collaboration and real-time physically accurate simulation. It runs on any NVIDIA RTX device — from a laptop to a server — transforming complex 3D production workflows. Omniverse is built on Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD), an easily extensible, open-source 3D scene description and file format for content creation and interchange among the most popular major game development tools. NVIDIA has expanded upon USD by developing new tools, integrating technologies and providing samples and tutorials.
Game creators, designers, artists and developers can unite their assets, libraries, software applications and game engines within Omniverse, freely iterate on design concepts in real-time, build tools to enhance productivity and instantly share breathtaking, high-fidelity models.
Omniverse for Game Developers
The Omniverse platform is designed for maximum flexibility and scalability. Developers can easily build their own tools using the platform’s modular building blocks. Game developers can use the ready-made Omniverse Apps, with many more being built by third parties.
Components featured in the Omniverse platform for game developers include:
- Omniverse Audio2Face is an NVIDIA AI-powered application that enables character artists to generate high-quality facial animation from just an audio file. Audio2Face now supports full facial animation and artists will have the ability to control the emotion of the performance as well. With Audio2Face game developers can quickly and easily add realistic expressions to their game characters, which can facilitate a stronger emotional connection between the gamer and the game characters, expanding immersion.
- Omniverse Nucleus Cloud, now in early access, enables one-click simple sharing of Omniverse scenes, removing the need to deploy Nucleus locally or in a private cloud. With Nucleus Cloud, game developers can easily share and collaborate in real-time on 3D assets among internal and external development teams.
- Omniverse DeepSearch, an AI-enabled service now available for Omniverse Enterprise subscribers, that allows game developers to use natural language inputs and imagery to instantly search through their entire catalogue of untagged 3D assets, objects and characters.
- Omniverse Connectors are plugins that enable “live sync” collaborative workflows between third-party design tools and Omniverse. The new Unreal Engine 5 Omniverse Connector allows game artists to exchange USD and material definition language data between the game engine and Omniverse.
