Nvidia has 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).

The expansion of Omniverse includes several AI-powered tools and features that give artists, developers and engineers the power to build virtual worlds and content easier than ever. They can also connect more seamlessly to today’s leading 3D applications including PTC Creo, SideFX Houdini, Unity, and solutions from the Siemens Xcelerator platform.

Omniverse, a multi-GPU scalable computing platform for building virtual worlds, is already in use by some 700 leading companies globally to enhance architectural and product design, simplify visual effects workflows, and build digital twins of factories, cities and the planet.

“The metaverse is a multitrillion-dollar opportunity that organizations know they can’t ignore, but many struggle to see a clear path forward for how to engage with it,” said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology at Nvidia. “Nvidia Omniverse closes the gap between the physical and virtual worlds, and these new tools, technologies and collaborations make it possible to leap into the 3D internet today.”

In addition to launching the Nvidia Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine — a suite of cloud-native AI models and services for building and deploying lifelike virtual assistants and digital humans — the company unveiled the following platform updates:

• Omniverse Kit — a toolkit for building native Omniverse extensions and applications:
  • Major updates to PhysX in Omniverse, including real-time, multi-GPU, scalable soft body and particle cloth simulation, help to bring more physical accuracy to virtual worlds and objects.
  • New OmniLive Workflows — An overhaul of USD-based collaboration in Omniverse brings increased speed and performance to multiple-app 3D workflows and enables non-destructive USD workflows, making collaboration between artists and developers easier than ever.
• Omniverse Audio2Face — An AI tool that can create facial animations directly from an audio file, Omniverse Audio2Face can now infer and generate realistic emotions and animate all facial features.
• Omniverse Machinima — An app for easily building 3D cinematics and animated films, Omniverse Machinima now contains hundreds of new, free 3D assets from the Post Scriptum, Beyond the Wire and Shadow Warrior 3 games, plus a suite of new AI animation tools like Audio2Gesture — an AI that generates realistic arm and body motion from an audio file.
• Omniverse DeepSearch — Now available for Omniverse Enterprise customers, DeepSearch helps teams use AI to intuitively and accurately search through massive, untagged 3D asset databases using natural language like “red, rusty barrel.” DeepSearch is a tool for game developers or VFX studios that have hundreds of thousands of untagged assets that pose an immense challenge to search through. Industrial Light & Magic is using DeepSearch to unlock its ever-growing library of environment assets.

Additionally, Nvidia Modulus, a physics machine-learning framework, is newly available as an Omniverse Extension. Nvidia says that Modulus-trained physics ML models deliver near-real-time performance and are 4,000 times and even 100,000 times faster, depending on the application, while providing accuracy closer to high-fidelity simulations. Modulus is one of the cornerstones of scientific digital twins, including Nvidia’s Earth-2.

As part of a collaborative effort with its partners in the industrial, design, simulation and CAD software ecosystems, Nvidia also unveiled 11 new Omniverse Connectors, which are USD-based plugins, further opening Omniverse workflows to companies in the industrial and scientific communities. These bring the total number of Connectors to the Omniverse USD ecosystem to 112.

Newly available in beta are Connectors for PTC Creo, Visual Components and SideFX Houdini. Nvidia announced the ongoing development of Connectors for Blender, Autodesk Alias, Autodesk Civil 3D, Siemens JT, SimScale, the Open Geospatial Consortium, and Unity, which will further unlock metaverse workflows for manufacturing, engineering and design companies.

Nvidia also released major updates to the core simulation technologies that represent materials, physics and light in metaverse worlds.

• Nvidia MDL — After serving for 10 years as the material standard for physically accurate representation of 3D materials, Nvidia MDL is now fully open-sourced, enabling developers to bring material definition language support to any renderer.
• NeuralVDB, coming soon to beta, is the next evolution of OpenVDB and brings AI and GPU optimization to sparse volume datasets. Nvidia says it also reduces the memory footprint of these massive datasets by up to 100 times.