NURBS support?

Yes, I know this is crazy talk, but we do have a pretty good use case for it.

I’m the CIO for South Park Studios. One the biggest challenges we face (aside from having to create an episode from scratch in less than 6 days before it airs) is the very large crowds our creators have become so fond of.

I see Omniverse as a fantastic way to allow a team of animators to create these shots much more quickly than just one poor soul grinding away for a day or two.

Two issues I see with being able to do this as Omniverse is currently planned to be implemented:

  1. We are 100% based on NURBS Trim Planar surfaces and everyone else on the planet seems to be poly based only. This resolution independence is crucial for the look and feel of the show, among many other factors so I am curious if anyone at nVidia has considered this challenge and how one might approach it in Omniverse. Would it require a completely new rendering engine or would the existing one be able to deal with such surfaces with modification?

  2. Our artists are 100% Mac based, which has its own obvious challenges with regards to using nVidia products. However, if I am understanding the implementation of the Omniverse workflow, the only thing we would really need ported would be the Maya connector. Everything else is data center based, and therefore wouldn’t need to be macOS friendly.

So… I guess for now I’m wondering what would the likelihood of seeing such connector code open sourced be? For example, if Autodesk (who I assume wrote the current Maya connector) where to release the source, our crack team of in house developers could take a stab at doing the porting ourselves.

I’m also very eager to get my hands on Omniverse Machinima was I think that could be the thing that allows us to do the one thing that terrifies me the most about how our creators like to push boundaries. Air a live episode of South Park.

Please let me know what you all think about these challenges. Am I just a overly naïve dreamer or could Omniverse really be the system that let’s us take the show to the next level?

Cheers,

J. J. Franzen
C. I. O. South Park Studios
jj@lacasabonita.com

Hey J.J. -

It’s been a while. Drop me an email at rkerris@nvidia.com We can set up a time to chat live.

We’ll take very good care of you :-)

Richard