A Metaverse for Developers
Building on the Omniverse Development Platform
By Damien Fagnou, Senior Director of Software, Omniverse, NVIDIA
To make new virtual worlds that are rich in detail and incredibly immersive, creators and developers must generate incredible amounts of new data and 3D content. But when it comes to producing 3D assets using current creation tools, it can often be time-consuming and challenging. To address this, developers need to create new tools that are more approachable to a larger number of people — tools that leverage AI and big data to generate lots of content rapidly. Additionally, all the content needs to be stored in a format that is open and enables easy interoperability.
Traditional developers typically build custom tools and extensions to tackle painstaking, tedious manual work, such as automating asset conversion, thumbnail generation, creating asset browsers, manual animation, or even populating storefronts. With recent advancements, combined with the rise in microservices and cloud-scale computing, more developers are transitioning to workflows with automation, letting the computers ‘do the work’ for them in the background. This automation doesn’t require programming knowledge, as the innovation in AI and no-code workflows will allow developers to use graphical interfaces — or even natural language — to define automated workflow and creation tasks.
NVIDIA Omniverse is a reference development platform, built from the ground up to be easily extensible and customizable with a modular development framework. While end-users and content creators leverage the Omniverse platform to connect and accelerate their 3D workflows, developers can plug into the platform layer of the Omniverse stack to easily build extensions, apps and microservices on Omniverse Kit.
Omniverse Kit is a powerful toolkit, designed to be a flexible and extensible development platform for both apps and microservices. It can be run headless to create a microservice, or with a UI. Rather than being a traditional monolithic application, Omniverse Kit was built to be extremely modular and easily extensible, made up of Kit Extensions.
Kit Extensions are small pieces of code that are purpose-built to achieve a specific task — the building blocks of Omniverse apps. Every Omniverse app, such as Omniverse Create or Omniverse View, is composed of a collection of specific Omniverse Kit Extensions.
The Omniverse Kit Extensions System enables anybody with basic programming knowledge to build powerful tools quickly and distribute them to the content makers, or to package them into microservices to empower new distributed workflows. Extensions are mostly authored in Python for ultimate usability and have source code provided, so developers can inspect, experiment and build to suit their needs using a Script Editor. Today, there are over 200 existing Extensions available with Omniverse and ready for developers to use, or they can customize using the source.
Developers can also use the powerful Omni.UI system — an ultra-lightweight, GPU-accelerated user interface framework that is the foundational UI for all Omniverse Kit-based applications. It is fully styleable, similar to HTML stylesheets, and works on Linux and Windows with DX12 and Vulkan-accelerated backends. Omni.UI is an excellent asset for developers as it is feature complete, and allows developers to create any interface and specify in a simple, declarative way to help reduce the amount of code lines required.
For complex workflows requiring Graph UI, such as Material Shading, Action Graph, Visual Programming, Particle Systems or Extension Dependency, developers can leverage the Omni:UI Graph framework. The tooling and APIs within Omni:UI enable developers to purpose-build their own custom graph extensions, both in terms of form and functionality.
We are already seeing the community starting to extend, build and connect to Omniverse by leveraging the powers of Omniverse Kit — for example, Bentley Systems is building integration from their iTwin to Omniverse platform, and Lightmap is building an extension to bring lighting control to creative workflows, and many more individual citizen developers are experimenting with connectors.
Join the Omniverse developer community and get started today. Make sure to also register for GPU Technology Conference which starts November 8 and join us for a special NVIDIA Omniverse Developer Day to learn how to build, license, and distribute Omniverse extensions, apps, and connectors.
See the Omniverse Developer Resource Center for additional resources, view the latest tutorials on Omniverse, check out the forums for support or join the Omniverse Discord server to chat with the community.
Meet the Author
Damien Fagnou is currently senior director, software at NVIDIA, working on the NVIDIA Omniverse group, where he brings together his expertise in software and VFX production to help build the Omniverse Kit Application platform. Before that, Damien was the senior vice president of technology for Technicolor, where he oversaw technology and software strategy for the VFX group, including MPC Film, for which he was the CTO for many years, working directly on the Oscar-winning films “The Jungle Book” and “1917.” During that time MPC also created the VFX for the groundbreaking “Lion King” remake. With almost 20 years of experience in VFX, many-time GTC contributor Damien looks forward to contributing to the future of graphics software at NVIDIA, built around compute, raytracing, and AI.
