Editor’s note: This is one in a series of Meet the Omnivore posts, featuring individual creators and developers who use the NVIDIA Omniverse 3D simulation and collaboration platform to boost their artistic or engineering processes.
Movies like The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings inspired a lifelong journey in computer graphics for Piotr Skiejka, a senior visual effects artist at Ubisoft.
Born in Poland and based in Singapore, Skiejka turned his childhood passion of playing with motion design — as well as compositing, lighting and rendering effects — into a career.
He was recently named a winner of the #CreateYourRetroverse contest, in which creators using NVIDIA Omniverse shared scenes that flashback to when and where their love for graphics began.
Skiejka uses the Omniverse real-time collaboration and simulation platform for his 3D workflows when designing animation, film and video game scenes.
Over the past 13 years, he’s worked on the visual effects for a filmography of nearly two dozen listings, including Marvel’s Avengers and an episode of Game of Thrones, as well as several commercials and video games.
“I enjoy learning new workflows and expanding my creative knowledge every day, especially in such an evolving field,” he said.
A Lord of the Rende(rings)
Skiejka’s creative process begins with collecting references and creating a board full of pictures. Then, he blocks scenes in Omniverse, using simple shapes and meshes to fill the space before taking a first pass at lighting.
After experimenting with a scene’s different layers, Skiejka replaces his blocked prototypes with high-resolution assets — perfecting the lighting and tweaking material textures as final touches.
Watch a stunning example of his creative process in this video, which was recognized in the NVIDIA Omniverse #CreateYourRetroverse contest:
According to Skiejka, the main challenges he previously faced were long rendering times and slow software feedback when lighting and shading.
“Now, with NVIDIA RTX technology, render time is greatly decreased, and visual feedback occurs in real time,” he said. “The Omniverse Kit framework and the Omniverse Nucleus server are superb game-changers and perfect additions to my workflow.”
Skiejka’s favorite feature of the platform, however, is the Omniverse Create scene composition application. He said it’s “packed with valuable extensions, like PhysX and Flow,” which he used while designing the retroverse scene above.
“I hope I showed the spirit of childhood in my #CreateYourRetroverse video, and that this artistic time tunnel between the past and present will inspire others to showcase their experiences, too,” Skiejka said.
Learn more about NVIDIA Omniverse.