omniverse and USD usecase for arch viz?

[Jens]

I was wondering if anyone has had a go at Nvidia's omniverse and the USD format in a production setup?

Been trying to read up on things and watching their stuff on youtube, but I'm still not sure what it would benefint us. I can see the USD format and use of omniverse to maybe be relevant cross software suites. I.e. people sitting with a revit model, could share and visualize the exact same images as people with 3ds max, sketchup, rhino etc. Maybe also all could use the same asset library? Is this the gist of it or am I missing something? Else I can't see the benefit of it vs corona or any other renderer really.

[Liftmode]

I thought 3dsmax supported USD as well?  I believe Omniverse has a realtime rendering engine as part of it's suite of tools. From what I can gather, it's primary focus is on 3d realtime rendering and simulations. Could be very useful for Archviz, especially for VR/walkthrough application. Kinda seems like what Unreal Engine can produce? Def worth looking at if you want to expand your skillset. VR is going to blow up in the coming years.

[Jens]

USD is indeed supported in max, but I just don't see the use case in archviz right now as described in my post. Hence I was asking if someone had any experience with it in that regard. For walkthroughs/VR there's a bunch of other solutions and the "VR is going to blow up" has been said for years now :)

[Basshunter]

there's a bunch of other solutions

May I ask what other solutions you'd prefer?

[TomG]

... "VR is going to blow up" has been said for years now :)

This did give me a chuckle! It has been said, several times, across quite a time span. I personally love VR, but I can see why it hasn't got a wider reach or adoption yet - even though I love it for gaming, it is rare that I can be bothered to take the time to set it up despite how much fun I have with it. I still say it gives a true sense of "space" in renderings that I don't get from a 2D image or even from an animation, just an instinctive and immediate feel of the dimensions of a room or object, which is a wonderful feeling. But we are still waiting on cheaper, easier to set up, more comfortable to wear before it becomes widely adopted. One day, one day.....

[Basshunter]

I personally don't find the VR thing very appealing. However, the real time rendering looks like something I could benefit from in a lot. Most of my projects involves heavy use of lights and fog (Stage design) and I always end up with simple scenes (few polygons) that takes ages to render. It's very frustrating. I could sell one of my kidneys and get a 3990x but even then I doubt very much I'd be able to shorten my render times to a couple minutes, even for previews.

On the other hand, most of the time I need to animate these lights to show how they would perform on stage. So it seems to me that I definitely need to start looking into something else than off line renderers, at least something different than CPU based ones.

So I've started checking NVidia Omniverse and UE.

[Juraj]

I believe nVidia just wanted a tool to present their performance to non-gamers, particularly designers, CGI artists, etc.. in the best way possible and under their control.

A pure real-time engine stripped of game making ability, always with day one support of their latest CUDA, Tensor cores, DLSS,...

How much it is/stays a marketing tool or be actually adopted as industry tool is debatable. It has big overlap with other tools obviously, like Marmoset, Unreal Engine, or even GPU path-tracers.
Lot of tools lately don't fit into neat boxes.

[burnin]

Here's latest reveal: "Omniverse" going "Metaverse". So among standard stuff (visuals, RBD, sims) it's main plan and goal is having a digital double of real world to simulate & train AI, robots and whatnot, to virtually produce fully functional building before it's officially operational in reality. For architecture it starts w/ industrial buildings: factories, plants, assemblies, warehouses, terminals...
@21:52

[piotrus3333]

It is one hell of a freebie. If nothing else you get three render engines (from one capable of 60fps to iray with spectral rendering), simulations and scene assembly tool. Quite a lot of educational content, samples and libraries. Extremely clean UI. Considering this is still beta it's a very stable beta.

The main thing is USD and possibilities it opens. If you can not care less - I guess you could test it as a free Chaos Vantage alternative.