Media & Entertainment

BITONE Accelerates Marketing Production Cycles for Automotive With OpenUSD

Objective

BITONE is a leading expert in digital content and immersive experience solutions. Established in 2009, the company focuses on digital images, XR interactive displays, and technology innovation for 3D content creation, primarily serving the automotive industry. Many of BITONE's customers have high expectations for interactive reviews, more iterations, and near-instant implementation of feedback on photoreal 3D content. By using NVIDIA Omniverse™ Enterprise and Universal Scene Description (USD), or OpenUSD, BITONE established new processes to accelerate production times, compress review cycles, and deliver higher-quality work.

Customer

BITONE

Use Case

Simulation / Modeling / Design

Partners

Dassault Systèmes CATIA
Autodesk 3ds Max

NVIDIA Technologies

NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise

Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD)

NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPU

Using NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise, BITONE was able to accelerate production cycles, improve collaboration with teams and clients, and reduce overall costs for projects. Some major benefits that BITONE experienced with Omniverse include:

18X speed-up content delivery times
5X more creative iterations

Enhanced communications and collaborations with customers and stakeholders.
Streamlined pipeline by providing interoperability between 3D apps.

Accelerating Client Design Review Cycles

BITONE's clients regularly provide feedback on creative work, but the traditional production process often made it hard to meet the demands of customers' needs. For example, it often took up to six hours to render each high-definition animation for client review. Pre-rendered, baked assets also made it impossible for the BITONE team to incorporate feedback from the client in real time, leading to slow review cycles.

In a recent project, BITONE created cinematic advertising content for JiDu Auto, a joint EV venture between Baidu and Geely. Using NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA RTX™ 6000 Ada GPUs, BITONE optimized their production workflow by connecting their toolset and data and delivered shots and scenes up to 18X faster than before, reducing render times from six hours to 20 minutes. This acceleration in content delivery allowed BITONE up to 5X more creative iterations with the client per day.

"In the past, we needed to render small samples first and then send them to customers for viewing. Now we deliver 4K renders or use the real-time preview and rendering function for path tracing to allow customers to directly see the final effect through the browser and give feedback immediately," said Xiaobing Song, digitalization engineering director at BITONE. "This not only improves our production efficiency, but real-time feedback also saves at least half of our communication time."

Image courtesy of BITONE

Harnessing the Power of OpenUSD for 3D Marketing Content

The JiDu Auto marketing team provided BITONE with engineering data of the car from Dassault Systèmes’ CATIA. This data was imported to Omniverse and converted to USD, enabling BITONE's artists to interact with the data using different 3D applications seamlessly in a unified asset pipeline.

The team leveraged the Omniverse 3ds Max Connector for preparing the car CAD data for marketing purposes, and also for building the scene. They used USD Composer, a fully customizable Omniverse Foundation Application that enables users to assemble, light, simulate, and render large-scale 3D scenes. This allowed them to build the photorealistic environment and layout of the scene in one collaborative view.

"By setting rendering parameters in Omniverse, we can create a 4K render for review in less than 20 minutes," said Song. "The rendered images are then sent back to customers so they can provide feedback, and we can usually do this with each shot up to 5 times in a day."

"Converting all production files into USD through plug-ins helps us break down the car model into three modules: chassis, appearance, and interior. And we can use this for separate model arrangement and material addition to accelerate production cycles," said Song. "And through the layer file module, we can combine the split USD files together to preview the overall effect."

“By setting rendering parameters in Omniverse, we can create a 4K render for review in less than 20 minutes. The rendered images are then sent back to customers so they can provide feedback, and we can usually do this with each shot up to 5 times in a day.”

Xiaobing Song
Digitalization Engineering Director, BITONE

Bringing More Collaboration, Interaction to 3D Workflows

By integrating Omniverse and USD into their production workflows, BITONE allows their customers to see high-quality animation previews of 3D shots, with added materials, textures, and scene lighting earlier on in the production process.

Before using Omniverse, BITONE exchanged and stored material assets with customers through third-party software. Now, customers can directly upload assets and model data to available storage on a hosted server attached to Omniverse Nucleus. BITONE's production staff can work collaboratively with the assets through Omniverse Nucleus, managing access, file changes and work asynchronously or synchronously in a unified manner.

NVIDIA Material Definition Language (MDL) provides the team with the freedom to share physically based materials and lights between supporting applications. With MDL, BITONE has developed a unified MDL Material library using Omniverse USD Composer Material Graph.

Omniverse has enabled BITONE's internal production staff to work together more efficiently, by reducing data import and export between applications. Their artists can express and share creative ideas faster with the directors, building their due to a unified asset pipeline and real-time rendering, giving directors the ability to see shots in full context with lighting and materials.

Developing Custom Production and Rendering Applications

BITONE is also working on developing their own custom Omniverse Application, a 3D car picture production and rendering app called BITONE Serviceshop Image (BSI). Built on the Omniverse platform, the app will be designed to help internal users and external customers quickly create, preview and render high-quality car images on a unified platform.

"We plan to develop an application using Omniverse that can not only meet the needs of confirming materials and lighting, but also allow customers to operate and render multi-angle large images by themselves," said Song. "The BITONE Serviceshop Image (BSI) app will provide customers with an easy-to-use, efficient, customizable and interactive car image rendering service, and we will provide a combination of agile customization services and simple platform products."

Image courtesy of BITONE

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