By Mike McCarthy

SIGGRAPH 2021 is entirely online this year, and having attended in person in the past, this seems like one of the hardest experiences to translate into an online virtual event. While pretty much everything exhibited at SIGGRAPH is digital, we are limited in our experience of a virtual event by the display we are using at home, so this makes it hard to see updates in new display technology, for example. This was an issue for me when I wrote about HDR content creation as well. How can I show the differences between SDR and HDR in a medium (a website) that is limited to SDR? So this is a challenge for all right now.

One company that has embraced this virtual experience is Nvidia, which used SIGGRAPH as an opportunity to announce a number of new products. On the hardware side, Nvidia announced the RTX A2000 GPU, which is a lower-tier professional GPU card with full RTX support. It is a dual-slot, low-profile card, so it will fit into 2U servers and smaller desktop cases. With 3,328 cores, it is nearly on par with a Quadro P5000 in terms of processing power and bandwidth but offers less memory (6GB). Sitting between the GeForce 3050TI and the 3060 performance-wise, this card should be powerful enough to meet the needs of most UHD video editors as a full pro solution for under $500.

The fact that it is a low-profile PCIe card with no external PCIe power-connector requirements makes converting a refurbished storage server into a video editing station even easier. I have described this approach in the past, but low-profile PCIe slots and PCIe power plugs are usually the limiting factors preventing certain models from being used that way. The RTX A2000 uses four Mini-DisplayPort 1.4 connectors, which are not my favorite option, but I understand why they are necessary on a card this size since the second slot is needed for cooling vents.

GTC Documentary
Nvidia also shared a behind-the-scenes documentary about how they made this year’s GTC keynote. I watched that keynote back in April and noticed a few visual effects that surprised me. I assumed that this must have been accomplished by shooting Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang in front of a greenscreen for a virtual kitchen. To my surprise, the entire thing — including the presenter — was fully CGI.

They did an incredible job of matching previous presentations from Jensen’s kitchen, which I presume were traditionally shot for past shows. And, of course, Nvidia leaned heavily on Nvidia Omniverse and its own 3D tools to make it happen.

Omniverse
Speaking of Omniverse, Nvidia has all sorts of announcements surrounding that collaboration and simulation platform. Blender and Adobe Substance Painter now directly support Nvidia’s Omniverse solution for tying together complex 3D workflows. OmniSurface is a new extension of Nvidia’s MDL (Material Description Language) interface. And the USD (Universal Scene Descriptor) 3D format now has integrated support for accelerated solid object physics. This was developed in a partnership between Apple, Nvidia and Pixar.

Adobe plugin for Omniverse

Nvidia has also used its own Image2Mesh GAN to create GANverse 3D, which converts images of cars into full and usable 3D models via AI. It will be interesting to see this technology implemented in other ways as well. At this point, by my understanding, you can model things in Blender, move them through Omniverse to Unreal Engine, render them and edit them together in Blackmagic Resolve without spending a dollar. This is probably one of many ways for people to learn and explore functional 3D workflows with zero monetary investment. I find that I rarely have the patience for true 3D work, but I do find it interesting to learn about what is happening … and occasionally use some of those features for rough temp visual effects in my edits. I have always done those “postviz” effects in 2D, but with these new tools being developed, it is probably time to start doing some of that work in 3D since it is becoming much easier to create quality 3D content than it used to be.

Main Image: Omniverse for Blender