British 3D artist Rafi Nizam has opened a new animation with tools from NVIDIA’s Omniverse Create XR along with solutions from Epic Games, Autodesk, and Adobe, it was revealed on Friday.
at Masterpiece Studio
The award-winning artist is tapping extended reality (XR) and virtual production tools to build creative content with bespoke, streamlined 3D pipelines.
Based in London, the creative has previously collaborated on massive projects with major entertainment firms such as BBC, Sony Pictures, and NBCUniversal. He is also the Chief Creative Officer for Masterpiece Studio, Head of Story for Opis Group, and Lunar-X’s showrunner.
The following is his story on creating magic with the power of the NVIDIA Omniverse, a major platform for creating real-time 3D content, animations, and digital twins for the modern illustrator.
Rafi is one of many creatives tapping the platform for its ease of use, streamlined workflow pipelines, and cloud computing solutions, many of which are set to disrupt the global XR industry across verticals.
The Art of Creation with NVIDIA’s Omniverse
Nizam, whose illustrious work has focused on self-care, and remaining peaceful in chaotic situations, has launched his ArtSquad animation featuring 3D characters in a band that uses art to solve challenges.
Regarding his production workflow, Nizam said that NVIDIA’s Omniverse Universal Scene Description framework synched the numerous 3D apps across his animation pipeline.
He explained further, stating,
“This interoperability allows me to be 10x more productive when visualizing my show concepts — and I’ve cut my outsourcing costs by 50 [percent], as Omniverse enables me to render, lookdev, lay out scenes and manipulate cameras by myself”
Back from the Drawing Board
For his projects, he starts with traditional pencil and paper sketches “whenever inspiration strikes.” Later, he sketches out his ideas before shifting to work on Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, as well as Procreate — three of the world’s top tools for illustration.
Nizam’s 2D sketches become 3D productions after drawing them in Adobe’s Substance 3D Modeler programme, used to create virtual reality (VR) content.
Speaking further, Nizam added,
“Things start to move pretty rapidly from here, because VR is such an intuitive way to make 3D assets. Plus, rigging and texturing in the Masterpiece Studio creative suite and Adobe Substance 3D can be near automatic”
Using Omniverse’s Create XR app, Nizam later leverages VR tools to direct and design his content. He also works jointly with other industry-leading tools, including Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5, Autodesk Maya, and Blender.
He also uses performance capture platforms via Perception Neuron Studio for the latter part of his animation processes. The world-renowned animator also leverages Omniverse Create’s USD framework for adding the final touches to his animation sequences, using hyperrealistic physics and renders.
Nizam explains further,
“Omniverse offers me an easy entry point to USD-based workflows, live collaboration across disciplines, rapid visualization, real-time rendering, an accessible physics engine and the easy modification of preset simulations. I can’t wait to get back in and try out more ideas”
The illustrator also uses an NVIDIA Studio workstation with an NVIDIA RTX A6000 graphics processing unit (GPU), as well as ASUS Studio laptop with a GeForce RTX 3060 GPU across his home illustration workflows.
Entering the NVIDIA Omniverse
Nizam is one of many creatives entering the NVIDIA Omniverse, a free, enterprise-grade creative suite for developing 3D projects. The platform’s interoperable, agile system is compatible with multiple platforms from firms such as Adobe, Autodesk, Epic Games, Maxon, Reallusion, and many others.
NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform became a free-to-use tool for all Studio users following its debut in November last year. Subsequently, the Santa Clara-based firm updated users on changes to the solution at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2022 in January.
The news comes after the most recent update, where NVIDIA revealed its partnership with Autodesk to join the former’s CloudXR and latter’s VRED technologies via Amazon Web Services last month.
The massive partnership aims to streamline workflows via the cloud for enterprises developing assets for the industrial metaverse, leading to digital transformations across businesses and firms.
Doing so will provide companies with cutting-edge tools for architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) professionals developing hyperrealistic immersive experiences on AWS.
At the SIGGRAPH 2021, NVIDIA Chief Executive Jensen Huang unveiled a massive trove of new solutions from the company, including its Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), Universal Scene Description (USD), and multiple extensions for digital twin creation and machine learning (ML) tools.
