At this year’s Siggraph Los Angeles NVIDIA announced the release of DesignWorks, a set of tools intended to “bring the power of interactive photorealism to mainstream designers.”
According to NVIDIA, DesignWorks helps designers and developers “take advantage of our work in both physically based rendering (PBR) and physically based materials cornerstones of visualizing a design interactively with photo-real results”. Some of the tools in DesignWorks’ 24+ strong set include:
•NVIDIA Iray SDK – a calibrated, physically based rendering and light simulation framework, which now includes new algorithms that cut the time to visualize design changes.
•NVIDIA Material Definition Language (MDL) – a technology to create and share digital models of real-world materials between applications. MDL will also be available soon as a software development kit, providing a simple way for developers to access the growing MDL ecosystem.
•NVIDIA vMaterials – a collection of calibrated and verified materials for use in MDL-based applications.
•NVIDIA OptiX, a framework for building ray tracing applications. OptiX now includes support for the NVIDIA Visual Computing Appliance, providing scalable performance from laptops to data centers.
•DesignWorks VR – a suite of tools for incorporating virtual reality into design software.
These tools will simplify the jobs of a wide variety of designers, such as architects and vehicle designers. They utilize the already present physically based rendering found in NVIDIA products to realize a designer’s vision. Some of the tools have been in use on movies and videos games for some time now. However this new package is designed for a wider variety of professions and designers. As NVIDIA states:
“PBR isnt new. Contrast that with the requirements of an architect who might need to understand how sunlight will reflect off exterior windows or whether the lighting in a parking structure is sufficient for safety. Or a motorcycle designer who wants to understand if a particular kind of metallic paint will be attractive. To them, accuracy is of paramount importance. They need applications that let them see and interact with accurate visualizations of what their final product will be.”
You can find out more about NVIDIA’s DesignWorks tool set in the press release below, as well as at developer.nvidia.com/
Announcing NVIDIA DesignWorks: Unleashing the Power of Interactive Photorealistic Rendering for Designers
To bring the power of interactive photorealism to mainstream designers, were announcing NVIDIA DesignWorks.
DesignWorks is a new set of software tools, libraries and technologies for the developers behind the software that designers use to create the products we use, the buildings we live in, and the planes, trains and automobiles that keep us on the move.
The big idea of DesignWorks is to give application developers a way to take advantage of our work in both physically based rendering (PBR) and physically based materials cornerstones of visualizing a design interactively with photo-real results.
PBR isnt new. Its been used for movies and games where the requirement is for a scene or model to look good, but where accuracy is less important than achieving the desired look.
Contrast that with the requirements of an architect who might need to understand how sunlight will reflect off exterior windows or whether the lighting in a parking structure is sufficient for safety. Or a motorcycle designer who wants to understand if a particular kind of metallic paint will be attractive. To them, accuracy is of paramount importance. They need applications that let them see and interact with accurate visualizations of what their final product will be.
And of course these users will want to be able to visualize their designs the way that makes sense for their business. That might be at their desktop, on large multi-display walls, using virtual reality or even from a remote location.
These capabilities and more all come together in DesignWorks, with some two dozen tools that include rendering, materials, display and much more. Among them:
—NVIDIA Iray SDK – a calibrated, physically based rendering and light simulation framework, which now includes new algorithms that cut the time to visualize design changes.
—NVIDIA Material Definition Language (MDL) – a technology to create and share digital models of real-world materials between applications. MDL will also be available soon as a software development kit, providing a simple way for developers to access the growing MDL ecosystem.
—NVIDIA vMaterials – a collection of calibrated and verified materials for use in MDL-based applications.
—NVIDIA OptiX, a framework for building ray tracing applications. OptiX now includes support for the NVIDIA Visual Computing Appliance, providing scalable performance from laptops to data centers.
–DesignWorks VR – a suite of tools for incorporating virtual reality into design software.
Industry Adoption
Some of the most important 3D design tools on the market today already incorporate these tools.
You can find Iray in applications such as Dassault Systèmes CATIA. Autodesk VRED uses our VR technologies to provide immersive experiences to designers. And materials creation applications such as Substance Designer by Allegorithmic and popular renderers such as Chaos V-Ray and NVIDIAs own mental ray support MDL.
Find Out More
Interested? If you want to incorporate interactive PBR into your application or expand the capabilities you offer your customers, learn more here: https://developer.nvidia.com/