NVIDIA Researchers Harness Real-Time Gen AI to Build Immersive Desert World

NVIDIA researchers used NVIDIA Edify, a multimodal architecture for visual generative AI, to build a detailed 3D desert landscape within a few minutes in a live demo at SIGGRAPH’s Real-Time Live event on Tuesday.

During the event — one of the prestigious graphics conference’s top sessions — NVIDIA researchers showed how, with the support of an AI agent, they could build and edit a desert landscape from scratch within five minutes. The live demo highlighted how generative AI can act as an assistant to artists by accelerating ideation and generating custom secondary assets that would otherwise have been sourced from a repository.

By drastically decreasing ideation time, these AI technologies will empower 3D artists to be more productive and creative — giving them the tools to explore concepts faster and expedite parts of their workflows. They could, for example, generate the background assets or 360 HDRi environments that the scene needs in minutes, instead of spending hours finding or creating them.

From Idea to 3D Scene in Three Minutes

Creating a full 3D scene is a complex, time-consuming task. Artists must support their hero asset with plenty of background objects to create a rich scene, then find an appropriate background and an environment map to light it. Due to time constraints, they’ve often had to make a trade-off between rapid results and creative exploration.

With the support of AI agents, creative teams can achieve both goals: quickly bring concepts to life and continue iterating to achieve the right look.

In the Real-Time Live demo, the researchers used an AI agent to instruct an NVIDIA Edify-powered model to generate dozens of 3D assets, including cacti, rocks and the skull of a bull — with previews produced in just seconds.

They next directed the agent to harness other models to create potential backgrounds and a layout of how the objects would be placed in the scene — and showcased how the agent could adapt to last-minute changes in creative direction by quickly swapping the rocks for gold nuggets.

With a design plan in place, they prompted the agent to create full-quality assets and render the scene as a photorealistic image in NVIDIA Omniverse USD Composer, an app for virtual world-building.

NVIDIA Edify Accelerates Environment Generation

NVIDIA Edify models can help creators focus on hero assets while accelerating the creation of background environments and objects using AI-powered scene generation tools. The Real-Time Live demo showcased two Edify models: 

• Edify 3D generates ready-to-edit 3D meshes from text or image prompts. Within seconds, the model can generate previews, including rotating animations of each object, to help creators rapidly prototype before committing to a specific design.
• Edify 360 HDRi uses text or image prompts to generate up to 16K high-dynamic range images (HDRi) of nature landscapes, which can be used as backgrounds and to light scenes.

During the demo, the researchers also showcased an AI agent powered by a large language model, and USD Layout, an AI model that generates scene layouts using OpenUSD, a platform for 3D workflows.

At SIGGRAPH, NVIDIA also announced that two leading creative content companies are giving designers and artists new ways to boost productivity with generative AI using tools powered by NVIDIA Edify.

Shutterstock has launched in commercial beta its Generative 3D service, which lets creators quickly prototype and generate 3D assets using text or image prompts. Its 360 HDRi generator based on Edify also entered early access.

Getty Images updated its Generative AI by Getty Images service with the latest version of NVIDIA Edify. Users can now create images twice as fast, with improved output quality and prompt adherence, and advanced controls and fine-tuning.

Harnessing Universal Scene Description in NVIDIA Omniverse

The 3D objects, environment maps and layouts generated using Edify models are structured with USD, a standard format for describing and composing 3D worlds. This compatibility allows artists to immediately import Edify-powered creations into Omniverse USD Composer.

Within Composer, they can use popular digital content creation tools to further modify the scene by, for example, changing the position of objects, modifying their appearance or adjusting lighting.

Real-Time Live is one of the most anticipated events at SIGGRAPH, featuring about a dozen real-time applications including generative AI, virtual reality and live performance capture technology. Watch the replay below.