Editor's note: This post is part of our weekly In the NVIDIA Studio series, which celebrates featured artists, offers creative tips and tricks, and demonstrates how NVIDIA Studio technology accelerates creative workflows. You can be my wing-wing anytime.
This week In the NVIDIA Studio takes off with the debut of Top Goose, a short animation created with Omniverse Machinima and inspired by one of the greatest fictional pilots to ever grace the big screen.
The project was powered by PCs using the same breed of GPU that has produced every Best Visual Effects nominee at the Academy Awards for 14 years: multiple systems with NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs and an NVIDIA Studio laptop - the Razer Blade 15 with a GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
The team took Top Goose from concept to completion in just two weeks. It likely would've taken at least twice as long without the remote collaboration NVIDIA Omniverse offers NVIDIA RTX and GeForce RTX users.
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Built to showcase the #MadeinMachinima contest, the inspiration was simple. One of the NVIDIANs involved in the project, Dane Johnston, succinctly noted, How do you get a midcentury legionnaire on an aircraft carrier and what would he be doing? He'd be getting chased by a goose, of course.
Ready to Take-Off Johnston and fellow NVIDIANs Dave Tyner, Matthew Harwood and Terry Naas began the project by prepping models for the static assets in Autodesk 3ds Max. Several of the key models came from TurboSquid by Shutterstock, including the F14 fighter jet, aircraft carrier, goose and several props.
High-quality models such as the F14 fighter jet, courtesy of TurboSquid by Shutterstock, are available to all Omniverse users. TurboSquid has a huge library of 3D models to begin creating within Omniverse. Simply drag and drop models into Omniverse and start collaborating with team members - regardless of the 3D application they're using or where they're physically located.
Tyner could easily integrate 3D models he already owned by simply dropping them into the scene from the new Asset Store browser in Omniverse.
Texture details were added within Omniverse in real time using Adobe Photoshop. The team worked seamlessly between apps within Omniverse, in real time, including Adobe Photoshop.
From there, Adobe Photoshop was used to edit character uniforms and various props within the scene, including the Top Goose badge at the end of the cinematic.
Animators, Mount Up! Once models were ready, animation could begin. The team used Reallusion's iClone Character Creator Omniverse Connector to import characters to Machinima.
Omniverse-ready USD animations from Reallusion ActorCore were dragged and dropped into the Omniverse Machinima content browser for easy access.
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The models and animations were brought into Machinima by Tyner, where he used the retargeting function to instantly apply the animations to different characters, including the top knight from Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord - one of the hundreds of assets included with Omniverse.
Tyner, a generalist 3D artist, supplemented the project by creating custom animations from motion capture using an Xsens suit that was exported to FBX. Using a series of Omniverse Connectors, he brought the FBX files into Autodesk 3ds Max and ran a quick script to create a rudimentary skin.
Then, Tyner sent the skinned character and animation into Autodesk Maya for USD skeleton export to Machinima, using the Autodesk Maya Connector. The animation was automatically retargeted onto the main character inside Machinima. Once the data was captured, the entire mocap workflow took only a few minutes using NVIDIA Studio tools.
If Tyner didn't have a motion-capture suit, he could have used Machinima's AI Pose Estimation - a tool within Omniverse that lets anyone with a camera capture movement and create a 3D animation.
Static objects were all animated in Machinima with the Curve Editor and Sequencer. These tools allowed the team to animate anything they wanted, exactly how they wanted. For instance, the team animated the fighter jet barrel rolls with gravity keyed on a y-axis - allowing gravity to be turned on and off.
This technique, coupled with NVIDIA PhysX, also allowed the team to animate the cockpit scene with the flying bread and apples simply by turning off the gravity. The objects in the scene all obeyed the laws of physics and flew naturally without any manual animation.
The team collaborates virtually to achieve realistic animations using the Omniverse platform. Animating the mighty wings of the goose was no cheap trick. While some of the animations were integrated as part of the asset from TurboSquid, the team collaborated within Omniverse to animate the inverted scenes.
Tyner used Omniverse Cloud Simple Share Early Access to package and send the entire USD project to Johnston and Harwood, NVIDIA's resident audiophile. Harwood added sounds like the fly-bys and goose honks. Johnston brought the Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord character to life by recording custom audio and animating the character's face with Omniverse Audio2Face.
Traditional audio workflows usually involve multiple pieces of audio recordings sent piecemeal to the animators. With Simple Share, Tyner packaged and sent the entire USD project to Harwood, who was able to add audio directly to the file and return it with a single click.
Revvin' Up the Engine Working in Omniverse meant the team could make adjustments and see the changes, with full-quality resolution, in real time. This saved the team a massive amount of time by not having to wait for single shots to render out.
The 3D artist team works together to finish the scene in
