Nvidia has just announced a major update to its Ominiverse platform: as a virtual world that allows creators, designers, and engineers to work together, featuring the integration of design tools and assets from first/third-party applications into a single ecosystem of hardware and software. For some time now, Omniverse and the various NVIDIA tools that support it were still in the early stages of testing. However, at today's CES 2022 event, NVIDIA finally took off its beta test label.
Omniverse is generally available to creators
The company notes that Omniverse has been downloaded by nearly 100,000 creators. With today's update, Nvidia has also injected more new features into the platform.
Take Omniverse Nucleus Cloud, for example, a service for sharing large Omniverse 3D scenes that enable creators and customers to collaborate in specific scenarios in a similar way to shared cloud documents (without having to design large amounts of data for every small change).
At its core, Omniverse is a common scenario description format that makes it easy to import assets from existing tools. But at some point, you may want to pay for just one basic 3D asset.
The good news is that this update introduces support for 3D marketplaces and libraries for Omniverse Launcher — resources from companies like Shutterstock's TurboSquid, CGTrader, Sketchfab, and Twinbru.
NVIDIA Omniverse for Creators A New Way to Connect and Collaborate（via）
PlantCatalog from Reallusion's ActorCore, Daz3D and e-on software will also soon launch their own Omniverse-ready assets.
As for free assets, Omniverse is expanding its Omniverse Machinima asset set with new characters and objects from games like Shadow Dancer 3 and Smash Brood 2: Overlord.
Physics, Materials, and Rendering in Omniverse Showroom（via）
The AI-based Omniverse Audio2Face tool is also readily available for your character to speak (you can adjust the 3D animation of your face by referencing audio tracks). This is complemented by blendshape support and the ability to export directly to Epic's MetaHuman Creator application.