Within this lab, we provided two scenes to experiment with, one outdoor park and an indoor kitchen.
These scenes were imported from Rhino (park) and Revit (building). Within this lab, you will be guided through landscaping, prop positioning, lighting, texturing, review and rendering tasks. Although you will not experience connecting to 3rd party digital content creation tools like Autodesk Revit, McNeel & Associates Rhino and Autodesk 3ds Max you will still participate in live collaboration within the Omniverse Apps and the new levels of creativity and efficiency of collaborative, connected workflows with Omniverse.
Fig 1. Before |
Fig 2. After |
This video is a recorded example of this Launchpad lab with two designers and a reviewer collaborating on the outdoor park scene. In this recording you can see them progressing through the lab as they add trees, outdoor furniture, a fountain area, apply materials and set the time of day. These will be the exact steps which you will execute as you collaborate on the outdoor scene with your colleagues. We finish the video with the reviewer setting cameras for final renders.
Feel free to jump right into the scene now or you can quickly scrub through this video to get a feel for the workflow. We have accelerated the video but kept some key collaboration moments at normal speed for you to explore (listed with timecode under the video).
Full resolution file downloads: Accelerated (10 min) and Real-Time (47 min)
To set up the project for collaboration, designate one person to act as the project manager. This person will set up a shared project on the Nucleus server which will be used in this lab for collaboration. If you will be hosting a collaborative meeting we’d recommend that the project manager complete this step asynchronously ahead of time. The project manager will execute the following steps:
Set up your virtual machine’s environment.
Follow along to the instructions below to begin setting up your scene:
Collaboration:
Since multiple people may be collaborating on this project, we will set up a few layers or “Opinions” in USD lingo. Layers can be used in Omniverse Apps as you would use them in applications like Adobe Photoshop. Layers on top override lower layers and you can make them visible or not (with the eye icon). Use layers to try different options (or opinions) of material assignments and asset placement. Use layers to split the workload between collaborators or do both.
In this project, we will create individual layers for different aspects of the scene, Plants, Props, and Materials. Multiple users will be sharing these layers. You could have multiple “Plant Option” layers from different landscapers or try out different material assignments to present to your customer. You will develop your best practices depending on your workflows as well as with whom and how you collaborate with others.
If you will be collaborating with others as part of this lab continue to set up your scene for collaboration following the steps below!
In the layer manager, right-click and choose Create Sublayer or click Add Sublayer Button.
Navigate back to
/Projects/Outdoor_Sceneand enter the new Layer/USD File name in the bottom left, let’s go with AEC_Materials_Option01 for this one, then click Save.
Create a few more layers using the same process.
AEC_Props_Option01
AEC_Plants_Option01
Adding these layers actually created .USD files, in fact, you could have created new files in the folder and dragged them in as layers to achieve the same result.
Now changes in this project can be segmented by topic, you could choose to segment differently depending on the task at hand but keep in mind that any changes are possible on each of these layers, you can change materials in the Props layer, these are just names to keep you organized.
From the File pulldown select Save to save your Outdoor_Collab.usd with these new work layers, these will make collaboration easier by keeping your edits to the design option layers organized.
Congratulations, as a Project Manager you have successfully set up your project for synchronous collaboration with multiple Designers! If you plan on hosting a collaborative meeting to work with your team using Live Sync we’d suggest that you start a meeting once this project setup has been completed. This would be a good time to walk your team through setting up Create, Connecting to Nucleus, and loading the file you just created!