Why Artists are Losing Their Marbles Over a New Platform for 3D Workloads

Artists, designers and creators can experience the powerful physics capabilities in NVIDIA Omniverse with the latest design challenge, #CreateWithMarbles: Marvelous Machines.

Contest Details

The second edition of the design contest gives participants a chance to explore the open platform and win big RTX-accelerated prizes. Showcase your creativity by designing a racetrack-like contraption using a pack of pre-made Marbles RTX assets, then dress and light your scene. Finally, enable Omniverse Physics with just a few clicks, then roll a flurry of marbles from start to finish.

What is Omniverse?

NVIDIA Omniverse is an open platform that makes it easy to enhance design workflows and collaborate in real time. Omniverse allows creators to connect and collaborate across their favorite industry applications like Epic Games Unreal Engine 4, Substance by Adobe, Autodesk 3ds Max or Maya, Reallusion Character Creator 3, and more.

Built on Pixar’s Universal Scene Description, Omniverse allows users to easily work with applications and collaborate simultaneously with others. Artists can upload, store, and access all their assets in the cloud, enabling them to easily share files with teams around the world. They could send a link, open the file, and start working simultaneously on the same projects in real time.

Omniverse Create accelerates design workflows by allowing users to interactively assemble, light, simulate, and render scenes in USD. Powered by NVIDIA RTX, Omniverse Create provides users with a set of advanced tools to help them create 3D models easily. Create also includes RTX Renderer, an advanced, multi-GPU enabled, path-traced renderer that lets creators visualize photorealistic scenes in real time.

With Omniverse Create, artists can experience real-time physics simulation with advanced technologies like NVIDIA PhysX 5 and Flow, which simulate the interaction of rigid-body objects and fluids in the scene in real time. Contestants can explore PhysX 5, which is available exclusively with NVIDIA Omniverse.

History in the Marble-Making

The Omniverse design contests are based on the popular Marbles RTX demo, which was first previewed at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference in March 2020. The stunning demo presented how physics can be simulated in a real-time, ray-traced world.

A few months later, NVIDIA released a more challenging take on the Marbles RTX demo by staging the entire scene to take place at night. The physics-based demo, called Marbles at Night, showcased hundreds of dynamic, animated lights — all the marbles were reflecting lights and shadows differently in real time.

Built in Omniverse, Marbles at Night showed how users can easily collaborate and design simulations with incredible lighting, accurate reflections and real-time ray tracing with path tracing. All the Marbles assets were hand-made, modeled, and textured from scratch. Artists from around the world were collaborating on the projects, manually creating the assets using applications like Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, Cinema 4D, and Blender and rendering using the Omniverse RTX Renderer.

Working in Omniverse allowed the creative team to view all the content in real-time, which led to shorter review cycles and more opportunities for iterations. And though the team were in various locations such as California, New York, Australia and Russia, they were still able to easily collaborate using Omniverse Nucleus, which helped them work on scenes simultaneously in real time. And NVIDIA wanted to provide creators with a chance to explore all this advanced technology with exciting design challenges in Omniverse.

The first “Create with Marbles” contest provided artists with an introduction to the platform. Participants were tasked to assemble scenes using real-time rendering and existing Marbles RTX assets. The contest was a chance for creators around the world to dive into Omniverse and familiarize themselves with the platform.

The second contest, “Marvelous Machines,” allows participants to experience Omniverse Create’s powerful, simple-to-enable physics capabilities. With new Marbles RTX assets to leverage, creators can experiment with Omniverse Physics.

Having a hard time getting started? Check out our most recent live stream on Twitch with marbles-expert Jacob Norris, now on-demand on our YouTube. You can find more of his work on ArtStation (PurePolygons).

Deadline for submissions is July 30, 2021. The challenge winners will be announced at SIGGRAPH in August.

Support and Getting Started

• Watch this simple tutorial to see how to get rolling
• Connect with Omniverse experts on the contest forum and their Discord Server

Join the “#CreateWithMarbles: Marvelous Machines” competition and submit your final video here.

Learn more about NVIDIA Omniverse.