Nvidia Corp. today announced the launch of an expansion to its Omniverse hyper-realistic graphics collaboration platform through an integration with Blender, an open-source 3D animation tool.

It also announced its upcoming RTX A2000 graphics card at the annual ACM SIGGRAPH computer graphics technology conference.

Blender now has Universal Scene Description support. That will allow artists to use it in conjunction with Omniverse in their production pipelines. It also opens up the platform to millions of Blender users.

The USD format was developed by Pixar Animation Studios and is itself open source as of 2016. It was originally developed as a method for collaborative project management, which is the basis of Nvidia’s Omniverse.

Nvidia Omniverse is a real-time collaboration tool built by the company designed to bring together graphics artists, designers and engineers to create realistic, complex simulations for a variety of purposes. Industry professionals from aerospace, architecture, construction, media and entertainment, manufacturing and gaming all use the software.

“Nvidia’s engineering efforts on integrating USD into Blender is exemplary for how the industry contributes to open source,” said Ton Roosendaal, chairman of the Blender Foundation. “Thanks to USD, Blender artists can have high-quality access to studio pipelines and collaboration platforms such as Omniverse.”

According to Nvidia, since the platform’s open beta launch in December, Omniverse has been downloaded by more than 50,000 individual creators. And professionals at over 500 companies, including South Park and Lockheed Martin, are evaluating the platform.

“Omniverse connects worlds by enabling the vision of the metaverse to become a reality,” said Richard Kerris, vice president of the Omniverse development platform at Nvidia. “With input from developers, partners and customers, we’re advancing this revolutionary platform so that everyone from individuals to large enterprises can work with others to build amazing virtual worlds that look, feel and behave just as the physical world does.”

When Kerris speaks to the “metaverse,” he is talking about virtual worlds being connected together that are shared, interactive and collaborative. That’s the vision that Nvidia has baked into its Omniverse platform and has been the driving force behind its creation.

Not only does Omniverse create shared, interactive worlds, but it also accurately simulates the real world. As a result, it can create “digital twins” of what exists in the real world.

This has allowed BMW Group to use the platform to create an accurate simulation of a factory in Germany with humans and robots working together. It allowed the company to optimize worker safety and efficiency, train robots to perform tasks and change its assembly lines.

Nvidia also announced its is extending its developer program for Omniverse. Developers may now build custom extensions and microservices on the Omniverse Kit. There are more than 200 pre-built extensions already available with source code as examples.

Through the Nvidia Developer Program, the company will open up the platform to its 2.5 million developers around the world, which includes an exclusive suite of tools, resources and training available for members.

Nvidia RTX A2000

The RTX A2000, Nvidia’s newest offering in the RTX lineup, becomes the company’s most compact, power-efficient graphics processing unit designed for small-form-factor workstations. It also delivers real-time ray tracing and artificial intelligence acceleration capabilities using Nvidia RTX technology.

The new compact design will make it easy to access RTX technology anywhere, especially at home, when remote work is becoming the norm. Since Nvidia Omniverse is powered by RTX, the A2000 will make remote collaboration for teams even easier.

For a low-profile design, it packs a lot of powerful specifications. It can provide up to five times the rendering performance from the previous generation in ray tracing with RTX on and has 104 third-generation Tensor Cores to enable artificial intelligence applications and tools. And with up to 6 gigabytes of GPU memory, it also supports error-free computing with Error Code Correction capability as well.

“The Nvidia RTX A2000 offers impressive speed and handles 3D design and visual computing files like a champ,” said Steven Blevins, director of the digital practice at Cuhaci & Peterson, an architectural engineering and design firm. “We’ve reduced high-fidelity rendering times from several hours in our Revit BIM software platform with occasional crashes to a smooth five or six minutes for ray-traced scenes.”

The Nvidia RTX A2000 desktop GPU will be available in October from manufacturers including ASUSTek Computer Inc., BOXX Technologies, Dell Technologies Inc., HP Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd., as well as Nvidia’s own distributors.

Images: Nvidia