British 3D artist Rafi Nizam has opened a new animation with tools from NVIDIA’s Omniverse Create XR as well as solutions from Epic Games, Autodesk and Adobe, it was revealed on Friday.
Rafi Nizam, Creative Director
at Masterpiece Studio
The award-winning artist leverages extended reality (XR) and virtual production tools to craft creative content with streamlined, bespoke 3D pipelines.
Based in London, the creator has already collaborated on massive projects with major entertainment companies such as the BBC, Sony Pictures and NBCUniversal. He is also Creative Director for Masterpiece Studio, Head of Story for Opis Group and Showrunner of Lunar-X.
Here’s his story of creating magic with the power of NVIDIA Omniverse, a leading platform for creating real-time 3D content, animations, and digital twins for the modern illustrator.
Rafi is one of many creatives leveraging the platform for its ease of use, streamlined workflow pipelines, and cloud-based solutions, many of which are poised to disrupt the global XR industry in all vertical sectors.
The art of creation with Omniverse from NVIDIA
Nizam, whose illustrious work has focused on self-care and keeping the peace in chaotic situations, launched his ArtSquad animation featuring 3D characters in a group that uses art to solve challenges .
Regarding his production workflow, Nizam said that NVIDIA’s Omniverse Universal Scene Description framework synchronizes the many 3D applications on his animation pipeline.
He further explained, stating,
“This interoperability allows me to be 10 times more productive when visualizing my show concepts – and I’ve cut my outsourcing costs by 50 [percent]because Omniverse lets me render, watch, layout scenes, and manipulate cameras on my own”
Back from the drawing board
For his projects, he begins with traditional pencil and paper sketches “whenever inspiration strikes.” Later, he sketched out his ideas before moving on to Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, as well as Procreate, three of the best illustration tools in the world.
Nizam’s 2D sketches become 3D productions after drawing them in Adobe’s Substance 3D Modeler program, used to create virtual reality (VR) content.
Speaking further, Nizam added,
“Things start moving pretty quickly from here, because VR is such an intuitive way to create 3D assets. Plus, rigging and texturing in the Masterpiece Studio creative suite and Adobe Substance 3D can be almost automatic.
Using Omniverse’s Create XR app, Nizam then uses virtual reality tools to direct and design his content. It also works in conjunction 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 final part of his animation processes. The world-renowned animator also relies on Omniverse Create’s USD framework to add the finishing touches to his animation sequences, using hyper-realistic physics and renderings.
Nizam further explains,
“Omniverse gives me an easy entry point for USD-based workflows, live collaboration across disciplines, fast visualization, real-time rendering, an accessible physics engine, and easy editing of simulations. predefined. I can’t wait to come back and try more ideas”
The illustrator also uses an NVIDIA Studio workstation with an NVIDIA RTX A6000 graphics processing unit (GPU), as well as an ASUS Studio laptop with a GeForce RTX 3060 GPU in his home illustration workflows.
Entering the NVIDIA omniverse
Nizam is one of many creatives entering NVIDIA Omniverse, a free, enterprise-grade creative suite for developing 3D projects. The platform’s agile and interoperable system is compatible with multiple enterprise platforms such as Adobe, Autodesk, Epic Games, Maxon, Reallusion and many more.
PHOTO: Rafi Nizam/Nvidia
NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform became a free tool for all Studio users after its debut in November last year. Subsequently, the Santa Clara-based company informed users of the changes to the solution during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2022 in January.
The news comes after the latest update, where NVIDIA revealed its partnership with Autodesk to join the former’s CloudXR and the latter’s VRED technologies via Amazon Web Services last month.
This massive partnership aims to streamline workflows through the cloud for companies developing assets for the industrial metaverse, driving digital transformations in businesses and enterprises.
This will provide enterprises with industry-leading tools for architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) professionals developing hyper-realistic immersive experiences on AWS.
At SIGGRAPH 2021, Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA unveiled a slew of new solutions from the company, including its Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), Universal Scene Description (USD), and multiple extensions for digital twin and machine learning (ML) tools.