Event Coverage

NVIDIA dials up its DesignWorks platform and offers "predictive design" for professionals

By Wong Chung Wee - 15 Dec 2015

Meet the new Iray plugin and the concept of "predictive design"

Meet the new Iray plugin

Last week, we were invited to the regional NVIDIA press briefing and we had the pleasure of Bob Pette, vice president of Professional Visualization at NVIDIA, who spoke at lengths about the latest development in its Quadro visualization platform. He sees the entire platform as an ecosystem that provides a framework for more efficient and organized design workflows. We all know that DesignWorks and DesignWorks VR was announced in August this year. To the end-consumer, these enterprise-level compute platforms may oft be overshadowed by gaming applications of augmented reality in GameWorks and GameWorks VR. However, he was quick to add that the cutting edge applications of augmented reality is actually in enterprise computing and NVIDIA has been hard at work to stay committed to VR for enterprise use and professional activities.

This is an architectural render of the new NVIDIA office in L.A., United States. The Iray plugin enabled photorealistic effects with the Autodesk 3ds Max application. (Image source: NVIDIA)

Bob Gette emphasized the demands of designers, and their need for photorealism, and interactivity with their rendered designs. Iray was a solution to their requirements. Traditionally, Iray has been offered as a feature in CAD programs like 3ds Max and Maya. According to NVIDIA, the industry support for the Iray is evident; however, its rate of adoption by professional users wasn't fast enough to NVIDIA’s liking. As a result, NVIDIA is proud to announce an Iray plug-in for such professional applications.

With Iray available as a separate plugin for supported applications, NVIDIA hopes to be able to accelerate its rate of adoption. It also offers a direct and efficient manner to reach out to professional users whenever there are major updates to Iray. There's also an exciting development for gamers as NVIDIA is in talks with Unreal about the possibility of incorporating Iray into the latter's Unreal game engine. Just imagine, a popular and robust game engine that is coupled with real-time ray tracing and physics-based rendering (PBR) hosted on NVIDIA DesignWorks platform.

(Image source: NVIDIA)

Instead of depending solely on the efforts of the companies behind the CAD and other Iray-support application suites, NVIDIA has developed Iray, as a plug-in for such programs. With such an investment, NVIDIA aims to hasten the adoption of Iray so that its inherent benefits of real-time ray tracing and rendering can be enjoyed by professional users. According to Bob, there are some technical hurdles to clear in the development of the Iray plug-in. This is dependent on how “open” the APIs of the supported CAD programs are. In this case, the APIs of both Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya were ripe for Iray plug-in development. The commitment behind Iray isn’t a piecemeal effort as NVIDIA’s push for its adoption is palpable; the company aims to make Iray plug-in supported on different versions of supported applications. It also aims to for cross-platform compatibility for both Windows and Linux operating systems.

 

Predictive design

(Image source: NVIDIA)

In addition to Iray plug-in development, NVIDIA has introduced Material Definition Language (MDL). This language contains digital models of construct materials, and their physical properties. Using MDL, NVIDIA has released vMaterials, which is the first edition of a collection of materials library that promises to be application agnostic. With this materials collections, MDL-based applications are able to render objects that are identical in appearances, as well as its physical properties. As a result of speaking the same language, MDL, with the help of the vMaterials library, the rendered object will appear identical across supported applications. The first edition of vMaterials contains over 200 materials.

Iray, MDL and its accompanying vMaterials are all parked under the DesignWorks platform as it encompasses the "software tools, libraries, and technologies” that support real-time ray tracing and physics-based rendering. It also includes NVIDIA OptiX, which is the framework that allows for development of physics-based rendering (PBR) applications. Additionally, it supports Quadro VCA to allow for scalability of GPU compute requirements. With VCA, PBR applications can be scaled across physical nodes to suit the needs of enterprise graphics compute requirements.

Since there are some laws of physics baked into algorithms of Iray and MDL, one of its touted applications is what NVIDIA has termed as predictive design. For example, in the design of light pipe for the new Shield console, the designers could accurately render how its emitted light would fall around the device under various environments. They could even tweak its effect by changing the angle of its housing, and is all done on demand.

On a larger scale of things, predictive design also enabled the architectural firm, Gensler, to avoid an architecture design flaw that would have otherwise created a hotspot in the new NVIDIA headquarters:-

(Image source: NVIDIA)

Before we end the first page of this article, we leave you with a video demonstration of the Iray plugin as it renders a Dewalt drill in real-time:-

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