NVIDIA Studio Goes 3D: Real-Time Ray Tracing and AI Accelerate Adobe’s New Substance 3D Collection of Design Applications

NVIDIA Canvas app releases in beta, June Studio Driver ready for download, New NVIDIA Studio laptops launched, and Omniverse Design With Marbles Contest now open.
by Stanley Tack

The NVIDIA Studio ecosystem continues to deliver time-saving features and visual improvements to top creative applications.

Today, Adobe announced a significant update to their 3D lineup, with new and improved tools available in the Adobe Substance 3D Collection: new versions of Substance 3D Painter, Designer and Sampler, as well as the new application Substance 3D Stager, and an entire new library of assets including models, parametric materials and lighting. The Collection, which is made up of four applications, features RTX acceleration in the form of ray-traced rendering and light baking, plus AI-enhanced features, to help 3D artists create in record time.

NVIDIA Canvas, launched in beta today, brings the functionality of the GauGAN demo to anyone with an NVIDIA RTX GPU, enabling them to turn doodles into stunning landscapes.

The new Canvas app joins ten additional creative app updates with improved performance and reliability from the June Studio Driver, now available for download.

New NVIDIA Studio laptop announcements from Lenovo give creators the performance and reliability to create amazing content faster and easier.

Time to Get Into the 3-Details

The Substance applications have been a staple for 3D artists for years. The apps leverage powerful ray tracing and AI algorithms to accelerate the production of 3D content. Now, the collection expands with new apps and tighter integrations, forming a cohesive ecosystem that ensures 3D design is faster and easier than ever, for beginners and experts alike, providing an intuitive experience without sacrificing on quality. And NVIDIA RTX GPU owners get the best performance across the entire workflow.

With Adobe Substance 3D Collection and NVIDIA RTX GPUs, 3D artists can bring their vision to life like never before.

Substance 3D Stager is the new app for assembling, lighting and rendering photorealistic scenes. It lets artists place and adjust objects in real time. Interactive ray tracing, exclusive to RTX GPUs, helps remove guesswork by rendering accurate lighting and shadows while you work on your scene.  And when you are ready to render the final frame, RTX GPUs provide big speedups for that too.We also get a peek into the future of the ecosystem with Substance 3D Modeler (private beta), which will be available soon, allowing artists to create and combine 3D models at every stage of the creative process, be it concept art, sketching or prototyping. Both applications use the cross-platform Vulkan API to access the power of RTX GPUs. Learn more and sign up for the private beta here.

Substance 3D Designer generates materials and models by using premade resources or creating materials from scratch in a non-destructive environment, while Substance Painter specializes in custom application of colors and materials directly to 3D models. Both apps have live NVIDIA Iray viewports for smoother real-time editing and RTX-accelerated ray traced baking for superior rendering speeds.

Substance 3D Sampler (previously known as Alchemist) converts physical samples and photos into high quality, ready-to-use 3D materials, saving valuable time from having to build materials from scratch. RTX exclusive interactive ray tracing lets artists apply realistic wear-and-tear and other effects to materials in real time, which is impossible with the CPU alone. Sampler features Image to Material and Delighter, both AI features supercharged by NVIDIA RTX GPUs.

Create more and wait less with the Adobe 3D Substance collection by running them on NVIDIA Studio systems with RTX GPUs. Discover the Substance 3D Collection with a 30-day free trial, and join their community to continue your 3D journey.

Create Stunning Photoreal Landscapes With Doodles

The new NVIDIA Canvas app, released today in beta, lets creators paint by material rather than color, using RTX-accelerated AI to turn brushstrokes into lifelike images. The app displays a photorealistic result in real time, so painters don’t need to wait to see the form of their vision — they see it right away.

The tool also allows artists to use style filters, changing an image in-progress to adopt the style of a particular painter. NVIDIA Canvas isn’t just stitching together pieces of other images, or cutting and pasting textures, but creating brand new images, just like an artist would.

RTX users can download the Canvas beta, take it for a test drive and provide feedback on the NVIDIA forums.

Time to Drive — June Studio Driver Brings New Features and More Performance

NVIDIA’s June update is the first Studio driver to add support for several key features:

  • Resizable BAR boosts performance on GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs by allowing the CPU to more efficiently access graphics memory.
  • Dynamic Boost 2.0 – which uses AI to balance power between the CPU, GPU and GPU memory on laptops with the NVIDIA Ampere architecture – is now optimized for creative apps.
  • Support for virtualization on GeForce GPUs, allowing users on a Linux host PC to enable GPU passthrough on a virtual Windows guest OS.

The Studio Driver adds performance gains to popular 3D renderers, mostly notably to Blender with up to 41% faster motion blur rendering.

NDI 5, the popular app that enables capture and broadcast of game and video content to popular live streaming services without using capture cards, is adding NVIDIA Decode support, allowing users to seamlessly broadcast and record up to 4K 120 FPS content.

Check out the release note highlights for the complete list of ten optimized apps in this month’s driver — including the Adobe Substance 3D apps, NVIDIA Omniverse, NVIDIA Canvas beta, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Lightroom, NDI 5, Pixotope 1.5 and Red Giant Universe — and download the June Studio Driver today.

Explore the Latest Studio Laptops

Lenovo recently launched three new NVIDIA Studio laptops for professionals including the new ultra-thin ThinkPad P1 Gen 4.

The ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 is the newest laptop to join the NVIDIA Studio lineup.

Reimagined to enable creators to work from anywhere, the ThinkPad P1 has an enhanced thermal design that enables it to support the latest NVIDIA RTX Laptop GPUs — up to an RTX A5000 or a GeForce RTX 3080 — in an ultra-thin form-factor. The laptop also boasts an impressive new 16-inch panel with a narrower bezel.

Powered by RTX A5000 or GeForce RTX 3080 GPUs, the ThinkPad P1 has everything you need to power your creativity.

The new ThinkPad P15 and ThinkPad P17 Gen 2 were designed for the most demanding creative use cases, also powered by up to RTX A5000 or GeForce RTX 3080 GPUs, with 15.6- and 17.3-inch UHD OLED color-calibrated displays, respectively.

HP launched the ZBook Studio G8 laptop designed for performance workflows. Seamlessly render, design and multi-task creative projects with up to NVIDIA RTX A5000 or GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPUs. Weighing in at right around four pounds with a 100% DCI-P3 PANTONE® validated DreamColor Display, artists can create on-the-go with ease.

The lightweight HP ZBook Studio G8 makes it easier you can bring your vision to life wherever you go.

Recently announced Studio laptops from Dell — including the XPS 15 and 17, Inspiron 15 and 16, and Vostro 15 laptops, alongside Precision 5560, 5760, 7560 and 7760 professional laptops — are now available for purchase.

The Dell XPS 17 offers a vibrant InfinityEdge 17-inch screen in a 15-inch size form factor.

Acer’s ConceptD 300 desktop PC, sporting an RTX 3070 GPU, and Concept 7 Ezel featuring a PANTONE validated 4K UHD display with multiple display modes, supporting RTX 3060, 3070 and 3080 GPUs, have just hit stores.

Become a Marbles Marvel in the New #CreateWithMarbles Contest for NVIDIA Omniverse

#CreateWithMarbles is back with the second edition of a simple contest for creators of any skill level. Participants must assemble a race track-like contraption using a collection of pre-made Marbles RTX assets using Omniverse Create. Add marbles, enable Omniverse physics and in path-traced or ray-traced mode, then light and render the scene.

Creators must submit their video by July 30 for a chance to win one of three top-of-the-line RTX-enabled NVIDIA GPUs.

For additional tips and tricks, watch the contest tutorial or connect with Omniverse experts in the forums or Discord Server.

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