Editor’s Note: This article is part of our Meet the omnivore series, which features individual creators and developers who use NVIDIA Omniverse for speed up their 3D workflows and create virtual worlds.
Edward McEvenue grew up making claymations in LEGO towns. Today, he creates photorealistic animations in virtual cities, drawing on over a decade of experience in the motion graphics industry.
The Toronto-based 3D artist discovered NVIDIA Omniverse, a global 3D design and simulation collaboration platform, a few months ago on social media. Within weeks, he was using it to build virtual cities.
McEvenue used the Omniverse Create app to create a 3D representation of New York City, made up of 32 million polygons:
And for the next scene, he animated a high-rise building with fracture and reveal visual effects:
Light reflects off building windows in a photorealistic fashion and vehicles pass by in a physically accurate manner, thanks to RTX-enabled ray tracing and trajectory tracing, as well as the physics-based simulation capabilities of Omniverse.
McEvenue’s art process integrates many third-party applications, including Autodesk 3ds Max for modeling and animation; Epic Games Unreal Engine for scene layout; tyFlow for visual effects and particle simulations; Redshift and V-Ray for rendering; and Adobe After Effects for post-production compositing.
All of these tools can be seamlessly connected in Omniverse, which is built on Pixar’s Universal Scene Description, an easily extensible open source 3D scene description and file format.
Real-time rendering and multi-application workflows
EDSTUDIOS, McEvenue’s independent company, creates 3D animation and motion graphics for films, commercials and other visual projects.
He says Omniverse helps cut his average turnaround time for projects by a week because it eliminates the need to send animations to a separate render farm and lets him import assets from his design apps. favourites.
“It’s a huge relief to finally feel that rendering is no longer a bottleneck for creativity,” McEvenue said. “With Omniverse’s real-time rendering capabilities, you get instant feedback, which is incredibly liberating to the artistic process because it allows creators to spend time and energy completing their designs rather than to face long waits for the beautiful images to show.”
McEvenue says he can produce more visuals on a computer running Omniverse faster than he previously could with nine. It uses an NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti GPU and NVIDIA Studio drivers to speed up its workflow.
In addition to freelance projects, McEvenue has worked on commercial campaigns across Canada, the United States and Uganda as co-founder of film production company DAY JOB.
“Omniverse removes a lot of the friction of exporting formats, recreating shaders, or linking materials,” McEvenue said. “And it’s designed very intuitively, so it’s incredibly easy to use.”
Watch a Twitch stream replay that dives deeper into McEvenue’s workflow, as well as highlights the launch of the Unreal Engine 5 Omniverse connector.
Take part in the creation
Creators around the world can download NVIDIA Omniverse for free, and enterprise teams can use the platform for their 3D projects.
Join the #MadeInMachinima contest, which runs until June 27, for a chance to win the latest NVIDIA Studio laptop.
Learn more about Omniverse by watching on-demand GTC sessions – featuring visionaries from the Omniverse team, Adobe, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, Epic Games, Pixar, Unity, Walt Disney Studios and more.
Connect your workflows to Omniverse with software from Adobe, Autodesk, Epic Games, Maxon, Reallusion and more.
To follow Omniverse on instagram, Twitter, Youtube and Medium for additional resources and inspiration. Discover the Omniverse forums and join our Discord Server to chat with the community.
