Substance Alchemist and Blender are among applications that incorporate new AI-powered features into content creation workflows.
NVIDIA has enhanced its RTX development platform with new AI, ray tracing and simulation SDKs. Exploiting these development enhancements, the latest releases of Substance Alchemist and Blender have introduced AI-powered features like denoising and material creation, bringing the power of AI to content creators around the world.
Substance Alchemist Uses Images to Create Realistic Materials:
Substance Alchemist, Adobe’s material creation tool, received an AI upgrade to its image to material feature that allows artists to capture a photo of real-world surfaces and create textures for 3D that can be used in content creation. It is a faster and easier way to create realistic materials.
Image to material is accelerated by NVIDIA RTX GPUs to run an AI algorithm that recognizes shapes and objects in a photograph. It automatically generates a higher quality, accurate texture map that includes base color, height and normal. The AI-powered image to material feature replaces Bitmap 2 Material (B2M) to import photographs into Alchemist, reducing the time artists spend manually refining, tweaking and de-lighting.
“The power of AI now allows artists to generate high-quality digital materials in minutes, from a single photograph,” commented Adobe product manager, Baptiste Manteau. “This is an exciting next step for Substance Alchemist, bringing the physical world into the digital material creation process.”
“Designers are always working against the clock,” explained Oneblock City co-owner and ArchViz artist, Daniel Margunato. “With Alchemist’s Image to material running on a Quadro RTX 5000, I am able to load, analyze and render incredibly detailed images nearly instantaneously. I can dedicate the enormous time savings to fine tuning and elevating my designs, it’s a huge luxury.”
Blender Accelerates Viewport Interactivity with AI Denoising:
With newly released Blender 2.83, artists can incorporate AI-powered denoising, a process that predicts final images from partially rendered results. This allows users to explore new ideas and quickly iterate on design choices with full confidence in how it will turn out.
AI denoising in Blender is based on the NVIDIA OptiX SDK and accelerated by the AI capabilities of RTX GPUs. It builds on the RTX-accelerated ray tracing introduced in Blender Cycles 2.81, and the improved speed of final frame rendering found in version 2.82.
This rapid rate of updates underscores the enthusiasm of the Blender open source development community for the game-changing advancements that RTX acceleration brings to 3D artists and designers.
“We’ve worked closely with NVIDIA to continually boost the rendering performance of Blender Cycles,” noted Blender development manager, Dalai Felinto. “Together we completed an entirely new backend for Cycles, integrating NVIDIA OptiX to achieve optimal ray-tracing performance using NVIDIA RTX GPUs. This will result in huge time savings and greater creative freedom for our users.”
The combination of RTX-accelerated ray tracing and AI denoising in the viewport makes 3D creation interactive, so artists can focus their attention on exploring new ideas to get to that perfect shot.
“If you need a single stylized shot or clean production-quality rendering, OptiX denoising is a huge time-saver,” commented aka askNK, a CGI artist and instructor, Nkoro Anselem. “You can play with light and movement and get real-time feedback. It will change how people work with Blender.”
“NVIDIA’s OptiX upgrade for Blender/Cycles is a fantastic speed boost for viewport and final render times,” added 343 Industries senior concept designer, Ben Mauro. “The AI-based denoising has been an incredible asset and time-saver in my work, where every second counts to meet deadlines.”
The latest Blender and Alchemist releases join a growing list of the most creative applications that incorporate AI-powered features into the content creation workflow. Others include Adobe Premiere Pro and Lightroom, Autodesk VRED, Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve, Chaos Group V-Ray, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite and Luxion Keyshot.
More information about NVIDIA RTX-enabled applications is available here.
Source: NVIDIA
