Creators Can Get the Ball Rolling in Latest NVIDIA Omniverse Design Challenge

‘Create With Marbles: Marvelous Machines’ contest invites artists to build wild contraptions with exclusive new assets.
by Gabriele Leone

Creators, artists, designers, engineers: get ready to roll — the next NVIDIA Omniverse design challenge is here.

Showcase your artistic style and creative skills for a chance to win great prizes in our new contest, #CreateWithMarbles: Marvelous Machines, which is now live. In this challenge, participants must design an epic contraption, then roll a marble from start to finish.

Similar to the first Marbles design challenge, Marvelous Machines is set in NVIDIA Omniverse, the groundbreaking platform for virtual collaboration, creation and simulation, and is based on the popular Marbles RTX demo, which showcased how complex physics can be simulated in a real-time, ray-traced world.

#CreateWithMarbles: Marvelous Machines is the perfect opportunity for creatives around the world to continue exploring and experimenting with the Omniverse platform and experience Omniverse Create’s powerful, simple-to-enable physics capabilities.

Contestants must install Omniverse Create, download the available assets, compose a twisting, turning, outrageous race-track-style contraption, set the scene and lighting, and render their final video in either path-traced or ray-traced mode. Then, submit a video to show how the marbles move through the scene.

Top three entries will receive an NVIDIA RTX A6000, GeForce RTX 3090 and GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, respectively.

Entries will be judged on various criteria, including the use of Omniverse Create, newly built Marbles assets from the original Marbles RTX artist team, physics, quality of the final video, and overall originality.

Judges include NVIDIA physics and simulation experts Michelle Lu, Liila Torabi and Masha Shugrina, plus myself and another of the original Marbles RTX artists, Fred Hooper.

Guest judges include industry luminaries Wendy Pham from DreamWorks, Dennis Gustafsson from Tuxedo Labs, and Sergiy Migdalskiy from Valve Corporation.

Deadline for submissions is July 30, 2021. The challenge winners will be announced on the contest page in August.

Learn more about the “#CreateWithMarbles” challenge, and start creating in Omniverse today.

For support and tips on how to get started, watch this Marbles Machine tutorial, get help from Omniverse experts in the contest forum and check out the Discord server.