After goofing around with Blender and Cycles, I wanted to compare how the experience of doing path-traced fog in NVidia OmniVerse.

This is what I’m working on at work, so using this daily artwork as a way to learn my way around the software is killing two birds with one stone.

One of the things that OmniVerse lets you do is have multiple artists collaborating in the same scene at the same time, like collaboratively editing a Google Doc. My friend and coworker Dave Tyner jumped into this scene from his home near Denver, Colorado while I was working from San Francisco, at like 12:30am.

I was going for a “cheesy spooky x-files black lodge” thing, and completely missed that this image looks like a forest fire. Many of our friends had their homes lost and the whole northern California area has been ravaged by these fires. Jeffrey Jones pointed this out to me, and I felt like it ends up being a bit insensitive.

Path traced participating media is so interesting. This scene is a single tree model, randomly duplicated with different scales, rotations, and positions. There’s a ground plane with a mulch texture, and a stopped-down sky dome, and then a bunch of duplicated sphere lights. That’s it!

This renders in OmniVerse in REAL TIME.

• omniverse