Search form

WATCH: ‘Marbles at Night’ Demo Illuminates Future of Graphics in NVIDIA Omniverse

Physics-based demo highlights dynamic ray-traced lights, path tracing, and 100 million polygons, all running in rea- time on a single GeForce RTX 3090 GPU.

At GTC this past March, Nvidia first previewed “The Marbles RTX Technology” demo, running on a single NVIDIA RTX 8000 GPU, that showcased how complex physics can be simulated in a real-time, ray-traced world.

During the September GeForce RTX 30 Series launch event, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled a more challenging take on “The Marbles RTX” project: staging the scene to take place at night and illustrate the effect of hundreds of dynamic, animated lights.

“Marbles at Night” is a physics-based demo created with dynamic, ray-traced lights and over 100 million polygons. Built in NVIDIA Omniverse and running on a single GeForce RTX 3090 GPU, final video showed hundreds of different light sources at night, with each marble reflecting lights differently and all happening in real time.

As the tech giant notes, “Reflections have never looked so good.”

Beyond demonstrating the latest technologies for content creation, “Marbles at Night” shows how creative professionals can now seamlessly collaborate and design simulations with incredible lighting, accurate reflections and real-time ray tracing with path tracing. According to Nvidia, “Artists are using NVIDIA RTX GPUs to take real-time graphics to the next level, creating visuals with rendered surfaces and light reflections to produce incredible photorealistic details.”

Pushing the Limits of Creativity

As the post describes, a team of artists from Nvidia collaborated and built the project in NVIDIA Omniverse, the real-time graphics and simulation platform based on NVIDIA RTX GPUs and Pixar’s Universal Scene Description.

Working in Omniverse, the artists uploaded, stored, and accessed all project assets in the cloud, allowing them to easily share files across teams. They could send a link, open the file and work on the assets at the same time.

Every asset in “Marbles at Night” was hand-made, modeled, and textured from scratch. Marbles RTX creative director Gavriil Klimov bought over 200 art supplies and took reference photos of each to capture realistic details, from paint splatter to wear and tear. Texturing was done entirely in Substance Painter, with multiple variations for each asset.

For more project details, and to learn about the latest announcement of Omniverse, now in open beta, head on over to the Nvidia post.

Source: Nvidia

Dan Sarto's picture

Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.