Nvidia's Omniverse Machinima is an RTX engine for creators

Beautiful ray-traced scene of a medieval city — (Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia blew us away at the GeForce Special Event with announcements surrounding the RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070, the ridiculously overpowered second-generation of RTX graphics cards. Amongst the hysteria, Jen-Hsun Huang also threw down some exciting advancements for accompanying RTX based software.

Built around the Nvidia Omniverse 3D workflow collaboration platform, the Nvidia Omniverse Machinima app is an ‘RTX-powered Mixer App for Video Game Storytelling’. In other words, Nvidia is providing an engine based on photorealistic path tracing, designed to simulate light, physics and AI with incredible physical accuracy to help bring in-game creations to life.

The engine will allow you to use your webcam to animate characters using the AI Pose Estimator, or use your voice to drive a 3D character’s speech animations with the Audio2Face feature.

I’m sure you all remember the truly suave sophistication and intricate beauty of the artform that Machinima brought to our desktops in the early noughties. Although the glorious Gmod mixes and OG Red vs. Blue series have been mostly lost to the ages, there are still creators working away behind the scenes to bring us shorts, and even full length feature movies.

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Indeed, the rambunctious, yet loveable art form we once knew is certainly not dead, it has been slowly growing alongside the tech and software advancements over the past two decades. It’s evolved in terms of graphics quality, though maybe not so much in its sense of humour.

The Omniverse tool is not the first of its kind, but it’s reportedly more flexible than alternative tools, such as Valve’s Source Filmmaker. It’s a universal design tool with asset exchange, the ability to import Universal Scene Description (USD) assets, so you’ll have a wealth of 3D game assets at your fingertips to create fully ray traced, cinematic marvels.

If you’d rather import your own assets, Omniverse Machinima also features connectors for the most popular third party design software, such as 3DS Max, Maya, Photoshop, and Rhino. Of course, Epic and Unreal Engine made the cut, too.

Price and system requirements are still a secret, but the beta release date is set for October 2020, which you can sign up for here. So, it won’t be long before you’re re-creating the likes of Combine Nation in 8K…

God, help us.

Having been obsessed with game mechanics, computers and graphics for three decades, Katie took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni and has been writing about digital games, tabletop games and gaming technology for over five years since. She can be found facilitating board game design workshops and optimising everything in her path.