NVIDIA Studio Empowering Blender Artists: Ducky3D

Sponsored content in collaboration with NVIDIA Studio and Omniverse.

While the tools don’t make the (blender) artist, they sure can help unlock creativity and new workflows by removing any friction with the content creation process, as well as giving access to next gen tools to push the barrier of what is possible as an individual or a small team. And when talking about the right tools for a 3D job, NVIDIA is the first name that comes to mind, not the least thanks to their NVIDIA Studio Platform and NVIDIA Omniverse.

The NVIDIA Studio platform, which is a hardware and software ecosystem combining the latest advancements in graphics cards, laptops, drivers, creative software, and more to craft a game-changing experience for content creators. This platform supercharges over 110+ creative apps by accelerating their most computationally intensive aspects with the power of RTX GPUs, all while providing lasting stability with NVIDIA Studio Drivers. All this awesome computing power is accompanied by NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform where creators can connect their 3D apps and collaborate in real time. It is then no wonder that NVIDIA is a go-to for many content creators.

Empowering Blender Artists

One such artist is Ducky3D, a staple of the Blender Community. One of NVIDIA Studio's featured artists, Ducky3D is a multi-talented creator who works in the music industry, creating tour packages and visual art related to music. He's also a Blender educator, known for his weekly YouTube tutorials that have garnered over 400,000 subscribers. He was just featured in the “This Week in the NVIDIA Studio” series, showcasing his beautiful Blender animation, “Stylized Alien Landscape.”

For his piece, Ducky3D used the all-powerful geometry nodes and the new GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU's, a nodal/hardware combo made in heaven. Geometry Nodes have been the unabashed rising star of Blender for the past year and half, unlocking the power of procedural modeling and allowing for non-linear, non-destructive workflows as well as powerful instancing and scattering of objects. This results in detailed scenes using small amounts of data, as seen in "Stylized Alien Landscape."

Viewport performance is of huge consequence for 3D artists, especially in Blender’s immersive and interactive viewport rendering workflow. Thankfully, this challenge can be tackled by combining Cycles’ recent rewrite that makes it much more responsive especially with the RTX-accelerated Optix rendering device, with NVIDIA RTX hardware. In this case, Ducky3D's GeForce 4090 RTX GPU ensured smooth movement in the viewport with virtually no noise, especially when combined with the allowing him to focus on the creative aspects of the animation. The animation was then rendered using the Cycles: When you can use a production ready path-tracer for your final product, without having to go through prohibitive rendering times thanks to powerful hardware and optimized software, you go for it!

Thanks to this powerful combo, Ducky3D was able to use two rendering techniques that are notoriously heavy on render times: Depth of Field and Volume, both of which contribute greatly to photorealism. For the shading, he relied heavily on the tried and trusted technique of clamping a noise texture using the color-ramp, and applying this as a bump map.

Through the use of NVIDIA Studio technology, Ducky3D was able to streamline his workflow and bring his animation to new heights.

To see more of Ducky3D's work and learn more about how he used NVIDIA Studio technology to create "Stylized Alien Landscape," check out the  the NVIDIA Studio blog. The possibilities are endless with the right tools and support, and NVIDIA Studio is leading the way in empowering content creators to achieve their aspirations. Check out the NVIDIA Studio YouTube channel for more educational content hosted by Blender Artists.