Editor’s note: This post is part of our weekly newsletter In the NVIDIA studio series that honors famous artists, offers creative tips and tricks, and shows how to do it Studio NVIDIA technology enhances creative workflows. We also study new ones in detail GeForce RTX 40 series graphics processor features, technologies and resources and how they significantly accelerate content creation.
It’s a holiday, creators!
Blender, the world’s most popular free and open source 3D creation package, has released a major update to version 3.5. Expected to have a significant impact on 3D creative workflows, this latest release supports Open Shading Language (OSL) shaders with NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing mechanism.
Additionally, 3D artist and director Pablo Reche Beltran, aka AuraProds, joins the 50th edition In the NVIDIA studio this week to share yours Jurassic Park-an inspired short film. Thank you to the artists who contributed to the series, to those who influence and inspire every day, and to those who will continue to do so in the future.
Finally, enter Watch ‘n Learn Giveaway organized by the creative community 80LV for a chance to win a powerful GeForce RTX 4080 GPU. Enter by watching an GTC Omniverse session for creatorsfilling it out formand tag #GTC23 and @NVIDIAOmniverse on social media by Thursday, March 30.
Better renders in Blender 3.5
Support for OSL shaders with NVIDIA OptiX, the Blender 3.5 update now allows 3D artists to use shaders in Cycles and render them on an NVIDIA RTX GPU. Previously, this workflow was limited to CPU rendering only.
This saves a tremendous amount of time for artists, as scenes using OSL can be fully rendered 36 times faster than using a single CPU.
Blender 3.5 also updates creative workflows in animation and rigging, nodes and physics, modeling, and more.
Read in full release notes.
Speaker renders will never go away
AuraProds 3D artist fondly remembers watching the blockbuster Jurassic Park in movie theaters as a child, hoping one day to recreate the memorable scene in which a giant T-Rex scares the main characters as they crowd into each other in a car. However, unlike that scary moment, the AuraProds artist’s video came together pretty cute.
“The concept art was created by my five-year-old and eight-year-old cousins,” said AuraProds. “They drew dinosaurs and inspired me to turn them into 3D.”
Based in Almeria, a small town in southern Spain, AuraProds had the perfect location to shoot footage in the nearby town of Tabernas, where Hollywood filmmakers often shoot Westerns. After gathering the necessary footage, AuraProds modeled the dinosaurs to populate the scene.
Its preferred 3D application is Blender. “Absolutely,” said AuraProds. “I really like it because I can bring any idea in my head to 3D with a simple workflow.”
The artist modeled and sculpted each dinosaur by hand using OptiX ray tracing, accelerated by Blender Cycles RTX, in a viewport for interactive photorealistic modeling thanks to his GeForce RTX 4080 GPU.
Satisfied with the models, AuraProds experimented with different textures before moving on to editing and animating their models. Motion blur visual effects were applied quickly using accelerated rendering and NVIDIA NanoVBD for easier volume playback.
RTX-accelerated OptiX ray tracing in Blender Cycles allowed AuraProds to quickly export fully rendered files to Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve software.
Here, the AuraProds RTX GPU significantly accelerated his compositing workflows. Color grading, video editing, and GPU-accelerated color areas were applied with ease. And NVDEC decoding, along with GPU acceleration, ensured smooth and clean high-resolution video playback.
“NVIDIA RTX GPUs are the only technology that can handle the huge number of polygons for this project. I know from my own experience how reliable GPUs are.” — AuraProds.
The RTX 4080 GPU has accelerated AuraProds’ use of new AI video editing tools, delivering a nearly 2x increase in AI performance over the previous generation. Performance improvements have also been applied to existing RTX-accelerated AI features, including automatic clip tagging and effects tracking, SpeedWarp for smooth slow-down, and Super video resolution.
AuraProds then applied several AI functions to achieve the desired visual effect. He completed the project by applying the RTX 4080 GPU’s dual AV1 video encoders, cutting the export time in half.
“I got to bring that aesthetic and memory into this new digital age with modern AI tools,” said AuraProds.
For more AuraProds video content, see VELOX — a short 3D film shot entirely on green screen — made by scanning an entire desert and creating several 3D spaceships over two months, available on his YouTube channel.
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Seasoned and aspiring content creators alike can find exclusive step-by-step tutorials from industry-leading artists, inspiring community demos, and more at NVIDIA Studio YouTube channelwhich includes a curator Blender playlist.
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