Architecture Engineering Construction and Operations

Design Firm Achieves New Heights of Production With NVIDIA Omniverse

Objective

NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA RTX GPUs enable OutdoorLiving3D to achieve new levels of real-time rendering and collaboration, creating photorealistic designs faster than before.

Customer

OutdoorLiving3D

Use Case

Real-time Rendering and Collaboration

Technology

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090, NVIDIA Omniverse, NVIDIA RTX A6000

Enabling Designers to Collaborate Remotely

OutdoorLiving3D designs high-quality renders of architectural visualizations and animations for clients. With everyone working remotely, designers needed a solution that could keep up with graphics needs and help them collaborate more efficiently. OutdoorLiving3D experienced the power of real-time rendering with the NVIDIA RTX™ Renderer in NVIDIA Omniverse™, NVIDIA® GeForce RTX® 3090, and NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs, which allowed them to simplify creative workflows and boost productivity. Now, rendering times for animations and designs have decreased substantially, and designers can collaborate and make changes in real time, no matter where they’re working from.

Pandemics, Holidays, and High Demands

At OutdoorLiving3D, the team renders over 500,000 frames of animation for sales and design presentations every year. Most projects consisted of working long nights, babysitting renderings, meeting tight deadlines, and occasionally using render farms—all while hoping nothing crashes.

According to Chris Scott, owner and CEO of OutdoorLiving3D, each project took 8-12 hours of rendering. “Having more projects in the queue compounded the problems,” he said. “That’s about 180 days of rendering. Constantly rendering for a few days without a break led to much stress.”

On top of everything else, the team shifted toward a remote work environment once the pandemic occurred. Everyone was suddenly working from home, which was a major adjustment from the familiarity of working together in person.

“We needed a solution to solve that,” said Scott. And with crunch time around the holidays, they needed technology that could keep up with the high-graphics demands of their projects.

Image courtesy of OutdoorLiving3D

OutdoorLiving3D spends up to 12 hours of rendering for each project, which costs over $500 each time they use a render farm.

With NVIDIA RTX A6000 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPUs, OutdoorLiving3D achieves real-time rendering to accelerate designs workflows for projects.

NVIDIA Omniverse for AEC allows the artists to simultaneously collaborate in real time while using existing tools like Autodesk Revit, Trimble SketchUp, and Epic Games Unreal Engine.

The speed and ease of Omniverse provides designers with more flexibility to edit, modify, and rerender as many times as they want with no opportunity cost.

Omniverse enhances quality for OutdoorLiving3D’s projects and has reduced production time by 1,000 hours per year.

Image courtesy of OutdoorLiving3D

Increases in Quality and Scope with Time to Spare

When Scott first saw the Omniverse demo, Marbles RTX, and the realtime path tracing at 1440p, he was immediately interested in the new technology. “If I could get one frame per second, I would be in heaven,” he said. “There’s no other product that could do the same and be so accessible as Omniverse.”

The week before Christmas, Scott had about 10,000 frames of animation to finish, with six additional projects in the queue. He was looking at 72 hours of rendering at minimum, or over $500 in render farm costs.

Scott registered for the NVIDIA Omniverse open beta. With help from the NVIDIA Omniverse support team, he was able to set up the platform, explore the new workflows and fully optimize the technology so he could save money while finishing projects in less time.

With Omniverse, Scott completed his first project with render times under one hour and 30 minutes, using a single GeForce RTX 3090 GPU. Omniverse provided advanced features like RTX Renderer for real-time ray and path tracing, Omniverse Create for advanced scene composition, and Omniverse View for building designs with physically accurate materials and leading-edge simulation tools.

These capabilities helped Scott push through the next four projects, each one looking better than the last. He even had time to re-render projects he had already submitted.

With Omniverse, Scott and his team can localize their assets without the stress of managing a server. “Omniverse will make rendering animations as trivial as sending an email,” said Scott. “I think you’ll see a 10x increase in video presentations, along with increasing quality and scope.”

Omniverse components like RTX Renderer and Nucleus allow the designers to immediately see any problems and fix them in real time, which has resulted in lowered production time by about 1,000 hours per year

“Omniverse will make rendering animations as trivial as sending an email.”

Chris Scott
Owner and CEO, OutdoorLiving3D

Streamlining Factory Collaboration

With rendering workflows now accelerated, the designers at OutdoorLiving3D can easily review projects and progress. The GeForce RTX 3090 reduced Scott’s rendering times for animations down to 20 minutes, which allows him to put together final rendering packages faster than before.

But when Scott got his hands on the latest NVIDIA RTX A6000, he was able to take rendering workflows even further. The powerful enterprise GPU enabled Scott to load massive scenes and even create point cloud scans of entire sites, which allows clients to see visualizations of the whole project without being physically onsite.

Built on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture, the NVIDIA RTX A6000 has 48GB of GPU memory and second-generation RT cores to accelerate photorealistic rendering. These advanced features combined allow OutdoorLiving3D to handle large, complex scenes while saving valuable time and resources.

“Our workflows can now go from conceptual design all the way to renderings and real-time presentations. We can show clients the projects and interact with the scene: where we can drag and drop objects, move things around, or even hide things,” said Scott. “When testing the RTX A6000, the point clouds were 34GB of data, but we were still able to load the scene while getting 30 frames per second—this couldn’t be possible without the RTX A6000.”

Scott believes Omniverse will transform visualization workflows and allow designers to make smarter choices, as well as improve the feedback loop from clients. “Not only will Omniverse and RTX GPUs make our jobs better,” said Scott, “but it will have an impact on design moving forward.”

“When testing the RTX A6000, the point clouds were 34GB of data, but we were still able to load the scene while getting 30 frames per second— this wouldn’t be possible without the RTX A6000.”

Milan Nedeljkovic
BMW AG Board Member for Production

Why NVIDIA

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 enables real-time rendering for instant feedback and interactivity, resulting in reduced production times.

With the NVIDIA RTX A6000, OutdoorLiving3D gets more speed and GPU memory to handle larger models and visualizations.

NVIDIA Omniverse allows designers to connect content creation tools and quickly make changes in real time while working on the same scenes.