OREANDA-NEWS. August 12, 2015. To bring the power of interactive photorealism to mainstream designers, we’re announcing NVIDIA DesignWorks.

DesignWorks is a new set of software tools, libraries and technologies for the developers behind the software that designers use to create the products we use, the buildings we live in, and the planes, trains and automobiles that keep us on the move.

The big idea of DesignWorks is to give application developers a way to take advantage of our work in both physically based rendering (PBR) and physically based materials – cornerstones of visualizing a design interactively with photo-real results.

PBR isn’t new. It’s been used for movies and games where the requirement is for a scene or model to look good, but where accuracy is less important than achieving the desired look.

Contrast that with the requirements of an architect who might need to understand how sunlight will reflect off exterior windows or whether the lighting in a parking structure is sufficient for safety. Or a motorcycle designer who wants to understand if a particular kind of metallic paint will be attractive. To them, accuracy is of paramount importance. They need applications that let them see and interact with accurate visualizations of what their final product will be.

And of course these users will want to be able to visualize their designs the way that makes sense for their business. That might be at their desktop, on large multi-display walls, using virtual reality or even from a remote location.

These capabilities and more all come together in DesignWorks, with some two dozen tools that include rendering, materials, display and much more. Among them:

  • NVIDIA Iray SDK – a calibrated, physically based rendering and light simulation framework, which now includes new algorithms that cut the time to visualize design changes.
  • NVIDIA Material Definition Language (MDL) – a technology to create and share digital models of real-world materials between applications. MDL will also be available soon as a software development kit, providing a simple way for developers to access the growing MDL ecosystem.
  • NVIDIA vMaterials – a collection of calibrated and verified materials for use in MDL-based applications.
  • NVIDIA OptiX, a framework for building ray tracing applications. OptiX now includes support for the NVIDIA Visual Computing Appliance, providing scalable performance from laptops to data centers.
  • DesignWorks VR – a suite of tools for incorporating virtual reality into design software.

Industry Adoption

Some of the most important 3D design applications on the market today already incorporate these tools.

You can find Iray in applications such as Dassault Syst?mes CATIA. Autodesk VRED uses our VR technologies to provide immersive experiences to designers. And materials creation applications such as Substance Designer by Allegorithmic and popular renderers such as Chaos V-Ray and NVIDIA’s own mental ray support MDL.