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 improves creative workflows. We're also deep diving on new GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU features, technologies and resources, and how they dramatically accelerate content creation.
This week's featured In the NVIDIA Studio 3D artist Brandon Tieh puts his artistic talents on full display with his whimsical scene Magic Valley.
An array of colors - from bright crimson to hushed blues and lush greens - help set the mood of the vivid scene, which took inspiration from Tieh's love for video games, anime and manga.
His diverse pieces - along with the works of fellow Studio artists like Christian Dimitrov, Vera Dementchouk and Eddie Mendoza - take audiences to fantastical getaways in the latest Studio Standouts video.
To fuel creative work, the new GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER is available starting tomorrow in a limited Founders Edition design and as custom boards from partners, starting at $999. It's equipped with more cores than the GeForce RTX 4080 and includes the world's fastest GDDR6X video memory at 23 Gbps. In 3D apps like Blender, it can run up to 70% faster than previous generations. The video editing app Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve accelerates AI effects over 30% faster than the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.
Get creative and AI superpowers with the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER. The RTX 4080 SUPER also brings great frame rates and stunning 4K resolution in fully ray-traced games, including Alan Wake 2, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and Portal with RTX. Discover what RTX 40 SUPER Series graphics cards and systems are available.
Stepping Into Magical Worlds Tieh's scene began as a sketch of what he envisioned to be a giant door in a grassy field.
A very broad and abstract thought - but that's sort of the point of fantasy, he explained.
Tieh specializes in building impressive worlds. To bring it to life, he began by gathering assets such as rocks and grass from Quixel Megascans, the Unreal Engine Marketplace and ArtStation Marketplace.
The door required extra customization, so he modeled one from scratch, first sculpting it in ZBrush before importing it into Adobe 3D Substance Painter for a quick texture pass. Tieh's GeForce RTX graphics card used RTX-accelerated light and ambient occlusion to bake assets in mere seconds.
Lighting will heavily influence the final look, so only a basic texture pass was needed in Substance 3D Painter. Next, Tieh tackled modeling the obelisks and pillars in Blender, where RTX-accelerated OptiX ray tracing in the viewport ensured highly interactive, photorealistic rendering.
Modeling and UV layouts of pillars and obelisks. He then unwrapped his 3D assets onto a 2D plane, where he applied textures to the model's surfaces to enhance realism - a key process called UV unwrapping.
Tieh's customized door in Unreal Engine. With the textured assets in place, Tieh next built the scene in Unreal Engine. His technique involves focusing on the big shapes by looking at the scene in a smaller thumbnail view, then flipping the canvas to refresh his perspective - very similar to the approach concept artists use. He adjusted lighting by deploying the same technique.
Magic Valley adjusting atmospheric light in the scene. I've used NVIDIA GPUs all my life - they're super reliable and high performing without any issues. - Brandon Tieh
Unreal Engine users can tap NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution to increase the interactivity of the viewport by using AI to upscale frames rendered at lower resolution, and enhance image quality using DLSS Ray Reconstruction.
Fog is another major component of the scene. Fog is generally darker and more opaque in the background and becomes lighter and more translucent as it approaches the foreground, said Tieh. He primarily used fog cards in Unreal Engine's free Blueprints Visual Scripting system to add a paint-like effect.
The majority of lighting was artificial, meaning Tieh had to use a significant number of individually placed light sources, but it looks very believable if executed well, he explained.
The menu on the right lists the roughly 100 light actor sources Tieh used. From there, Tieh exported final renders with ease and speed thanks to his RTX GPU.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/magicvalley-animated-flythrough.mp4
There's no secret tricks or fancy engine features, said Tieh. It's all about sticking to the basics and fundamentals of art, as well as trusting your own artistic eye.
3D artist Brandon Tieh. Check out Tieh's impressive portfolio on ArtStation.
Follow NVIDIA Studio on Instagram, X and Facebook. Access tutorials on the Studio YouTube channel and get updates directly in your inbox by subscribing to the Studio newsletter.
More from Nvidia
18/09/2025
GeForce NOW is packing a monstrous punch this week. Dying Light: The Beast, the latest adrenaline fueled chapter in Techland's parkour meets survival horror...
17/09/2025
Today's creators are equal parts entertainer, producer and gamer, juggling game commentary, scene changes, replay clips, chat moderation and technical troub...
16/09/2025
The U.K. is driving investments in sovereign AI, using the technology to advance...
13/09/2025
Celtic languages - including Cornish, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh - are the U.K.'s oldest living languages. To empower their speakers, the UK-LLM sover...
10/09/2025
GeForce NOW Blackwell RTX 5080-class SuperPODs are now rolling out, unlocking a new level of ultra high-performance, cinematic cloud gaming.
GeForce NOW Ultima...
09/09/2025
Inference has emerged as the new frontier of complexity in AI. Modern models are...
09/09/2025
As large language models (LLMs) grow larger, they get smarter, with open models from leading developers now featuring hundreds of billions of parameters. At the...
09/09/2025
At this week's AI Infrastructure Summit in Silicon Valley, NVIDIA's VP o...
09/09/2025
Inference performance is critical, as it directly influences the economics of an AI factory. The higher the throughput of AI factory infrastructure, the more to...
09/09/2025
At this week's IAA Mobility conference in Munich, NVIDIA Vice President of A...
09/09/2025
ComfyUI - an open-source, node-based graphical interface for running and buildin...
04/09/2025
NVIDIA today announced new AI education support for K-12 programs at a White House event to celebrate public-private partnerships that advance artificial intell...
04/09/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI On blog series, which explores the latest techniques and real-world applications of agentic AI, chatbots and copi...
04/09/2025
NVIDIA Blackwell RTX is coming to the cloud on Wednesday, Sept. 10 - an upgrade ...
03/09/2025
3D artists are constantly prototyping.
In traditional workflows, modelers must build placeholder, low-fidelity assets to populate 3D scenes, tinkering and adju...
02/09/2025
For more than a century, meteorologists have chased storms with chalkboards, equ...
28/08/2025
Brace yourself, COGs - the Locusts aren't the only thing rising up. The Coal...
28/08/2025
Last week at Gamescom, NVIDIA announced the winners of the NVIDIA and ModDB RTX ...
27/08/2025
AI models are advancing at a rapid rate and scale.
But what might they lack that (most) humans don't? Common sense: an understanding, developed through rea...
25/08/2025
Robots around the world are about to get a lot smarter as physical AI developers...
25/08/2025
As autonomous vehicle systems rapidly grow in complexity, equipped with reasonin...
22/08/2025
As the latest member of the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture family, the NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPU builds on core innovations to accelerate training and AI reason...
22/08/2025
AI reasoning, inference and networking will be top of mind for attendees of next...
21/08/2025
Japan is once again building a landmark high-performance computing system - not ...
21/08/2025
From AI assistants doing deep research to autonomous vehicles making split-second navigation decisions, AI adoption is exploding across industries.
Behind ever...
21/08/2025
Across the globe, AI factories are rising - massive new data centers built not to serve up web pages or email, but to train and deploy intelligence itself. Inte...
21/08/2025
Get a glimpse into the future of gaming.
The NVIDIA Blackwell RTX architecture is coming to GeForce NOW in September, marking the service's biggest upgrade...
20/08/2025
Editor's note: This blog is a part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused o...
18/08/2025
With over 175 games now supporting NVIDIA DLSS 4 - a suite of advanced, AI-power...
18/08/2025
At Gamescom, NVIDIA is releasing its first major update to Project G Assist - an...
15/08/2025
Of around 7,000 languages in the world, a tiny fraction are supported by AI lang...
14/08/2025
NVIDIA is partnering with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a...
14/08/2025
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Definitive Edition is marching onto GeForce NOW,...
13/08/2025
Black Forest Labs' FLUX.1 Kontext [dev] image editing model is now available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice.
FLUX.1 models allow users to edit existing imag...
11/08/2025
Using NVIDIA digital twin technologies, Amazon Devices & Services is powering bi...
11/08/2025
Packing the power of the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture in compact, energy-effici...
11/08/2025
Physical AI is becoming the foundation of smart cities, facilities and industria...
07/08/2025
This GFN Thursday brings an offer members can't refuse - 2K's highly ant...
05/08/2025
Two new open-weight AI reasoning models from OpenAI released today bring cutting...
05/08/2025
In collaboration with OpenAI, NVIDIA has optimized the company's new open-so...
05/08/2025
NVIDIA and OpenAI began pushing the boundaries of AI with the launch of NVIDIA D...
05/08/2025
NVIDIA GPUs are at the heart of modern computing. They're used across industries - from healthcare and finance to scientific research, autonomous systems an...
31/07/2025
August brings new levels of gaming excitement on GeForce NOW, with 2,300 titles now available to stream in the cloud.
Grab a controller and get ready for epic ...
31/07/2025
Interest in generative AI is continuing to grow, as new models include more capabilities. With the latest advancements, even enthusiasts without a developer bac...
29/07/2025
FourCastNet3 (FCN3) is the latest AI global weather forecasting system from NVID...
28/07/2025
The electrical grid is designed to support loads that are relatively steady, such as lighting, household appliances, and industrial machines that operate at con...
24/07/2025
For media company Black Mixture, AI isn't just a tool - it's an entire p...
24/07/2025
Sharpen the blade and brace for a journey steeped in myth and mystery. WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers has launched in the cloud.
Ride in style with skateboarding leg...
23/07/2025
In today's fast-evolving digital landscape, marketing teams face increasing ...
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 improves creative workflows. We're also deep diving on new GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU features, technologies and resources, and how they dramatically accelerate content creation.
