Designer #2

Your task today is to flesh out the water features of our park scene. This entails adding a sculpture and changing materials. Once the key landmark is in place you will focus on the ground materials throughout the park while Designer #1 will be adding trees and plants.

The following skills with be used during your lab: Layers, Prop Placement, Asset Manager, Materials

If you are familiar with 3D CAD or digital content creation applications, you should quickly get the hang of it!

We have provided a quick navigation video in the appendix but here are the shortcuts:

Remember that you can pick an object in the Stage (next to layer manager) and press F to center your view on it. This makes orbiting and resetting your view much simpler.

Zoom (scroll) and Pan (click + drag)	Orbit

Look Around	Walk (While looking around)

1. If necessary, launch Omniverse Create and then Connect to Nucleus Server.

2. Load the file setup above: /Projects/Outdoor_Scene/Outdoor_Collab.usd.

   The collaborative power of Omniverse fully shines when you enable real-time Live Editing. This can be done on a per-layer basis. For this lab, multiple Designers will open the same project file concurrently, therefore you should toggle on Live Sync for all layers. This will allow you to see changes that were made on different VM by the other Designers in real-time! Toggling on Live Sync is as easy as changing the Live Sync.

3. If you will be collaborating with others during this lab you’ll need to join a Live session for each layer. Follow the steps below to join collaborative Live sessions!

   Note

   Working with Layers

   The order of the layers determines precedence, if you have a white object in the bottom layer, then you make it blue in the middle layer and finally red in the top layer, it will be red due to the stack order.

   Also, remember that changes in the upper layers block change to that parameter in the lower layers. If you change an object color in the Props layer it will be locked from changes in the Materials layer but not in the Plants layer.

   Knowing this, if you try to make changes and are blocked, look in the layers above to see if changes were made there that locked it. If those changes are wrong, delete the deltas to free it up, and or change the order of the layers to put your preferred design option on top.

   You can also move deltas from one layer to another, if someone forgot to change layers and made a plant placement on the material layer, you can simply drag that delta from one layer to another

   
   

4. Turn off the grid if you don’t need it by pressing “G” key.

   

   
   

5. We can adjust the exposure in the viewport by turning on “Auto Exposure” in the Post Processing section of the Render Settings Tabs.

   

   
   

6. Navigate to the pond area.

   Note

   You will need to switch selection mode from Model to Prim Rrefer to the Model vs Prim (Selection Modes) video in the Appendix for more information).

   Attention

   Make sure the AEC_Materials_Options01 layer is active (Double click on it, it turns green and says Authoring Layer).

   
   

7. While in Prim Selection Mode, select the water surface geometry.

   

   Note

   Watch the Changing Materials skill videos in the Appendix for help with this task.

   Attention

   Make sure the AEC_Materials_Options01 layer is active (Double click on it, it turns green and says Authoring Layer).

   
   

8. Open the Materials browser and apply a Water material to the pond surface geometry by dragging and dropping the material to the selected prim..

   

   Attention

   Make sure the AEC_Props_Options01 layer is active (Double click on it, it turns green and says Authoring Layer).

   
   

9. To get a better view of the new water material switch your render mode to RTX-Interactive (Path Tracing).

   

   
   

10. Next, you will learn to add a sculpture in the pond.

11. Switch over to the NVIDIA Assets tab to find a sculpture (or Omniverse logo) in the list of Residential assets to insert in the water.

    

    
    

12. Adjust the size and rotation of the sculpture.

    

    Attention

    Make sure the AEC_Materials_Options01 layer is active (Double click on it, it turns green and says Authoring Layer).

    
    

13. Now let’s learn to apply a new material on the sculpture.

14. You can watch the Changing Materials skill videos in the appendix for help with this task. Omniverse ships with a base library, a vMaterials library, and a 3rd party fabric library from Twinbru. Feel free to experiment with different sources.

    

    
    

15. Select a material and drag it onto the sculpture.

    • Click Materials Tab

    • Select vMaterial

    

    
    

16. Adjust the material’s scale.

    

    
    

17. Then you can take what you have learned and apply materials to the walkway areas (Material Layer) around the fountain. Try using materials from the Base and vMaterials collections.

    

    
    

18. It’s possible to swap out all references to a material. Let’s update one of the Cobblestone materials used near the fountain:

    • Select Prim Mode.

    • Click on the paving below the walkway area you just changed.

    • In the Stage tab (upper right), scroll down to the material in the Property section and click on the Sphere icon.

    

    • This will highlight the Look used within the Stage panel.

    • Right click the Look and click on Select Bound Objects.

    

    • This will select every asset that shares this look.

    • Find a new material in the Materials browser, right click it, and select Apply to Selected to change every material all at once.

    

    
    

19. Try applying similar materials to the other water feature across the park by dragging materials from the Looks folder in the AEC_Materials_Options01 Layer.

    

    
    

Feel free to continue experimenting with assets and materials as you improve the design of your park scene!