From Flat Tire to Racing KITT

Creators in gaming, architecture and design rely on virtual environments like the NVIDIA Omniverse simulation and collaboration platform to test out new ideas and visualize prototypes before creating their final products. With Omniverse Connectors, developers can use their preferred 3D applications in Omniverse to simulate complex virtual worlds with real-time ray tracing. But not every creator has the time and resources to create 3D models of every object they sketch. The cost of capturing the number of multi-view images necessary to render a showroom’s worth of cars, or a street’s worth of buildings, can be prohibitive. That’s where a trained GANverse3D application can be used to convert standard images of a car, a building or even a horse into a 3D figure that can be customized and animated in Omniverse. To recreate KITT, the researchers simply fed the trained model an image of the car, letting GANverse3D predict a corresponding 3D textured mesh, as well as different parts of the vehicle such as wheels and headlights. They then used NVIDIA Omniverse Kit and NVIDIA PhysX tools to convert the predicted texture into high-quality materials that give KITT a more realistic look and feel, and placed it in a dynamic driving sequence. “Omniverse allows researchers to bring exciting, cutting-edge research directly to creators and end users,” said Jean-Francois Lafleche, deep learning engineer at NVIDIA. “Offering GANverse3D as an extension in Omniverse will help artists create richer virtual worlds for game development, city planning or even training new machine learning models.”