NVIDIA 3D artist Lorenzo Drago has created his new masterpiece ‘Etchū-Daimon Station’ using Unreal Engine 5, Blender and Adobe Substance 3D Painter accelerated by NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU.

From viral creator to NVIDIA 3D artist, Lorenzo Drago takes viewers on an incredible journey this week at NVIDIA Studio in Toyama, Japan’s Etchū-Daimon Station.

Drago’s photo-realistic animation of the train station has been viewed more than 2 million times in less than four months. The audience was amazed at the remarkably accurate details.

“Reality inspires me the most,” Drago says. “Ordinary, everyday things always tell a story. They have nuances that are difficult to capture in fantasy,” he says.

Drago started his work with camera mapping in the open source fSpy software. This process calculated the approximate focal length, orientation and position of the camera in three-dimensional space based on defined control points selected from the Etchū-Daimon reference image.

The artist then switched to Blender software for the first sketch, created with simple 3D shapes with no details or detailed models. The aim was to design, test and adapt the basic shapes of the level.

Drago then measured the height of a ladder and positioned it relative to the rest of the 3D scene so that it would fit the grid size. The scene was then made modular, adding one model at a time. Drago modeled at lightning speed with NVIDIA RTX-accelerated OptiX ray tracing in Blender view.

The whole scene is made up of a combination of incredibly special textured items. Drago’s rendering technique, using tileable textures and cutting blades, textures that combine individual details on a single page, took the realism of the scene to a whole new level. The mix of all these techniques helped create original, more detailed textures and preserve the pixel density throughout the scene. So the size of the textures never exceeded 2048×2048 pixels.

Drago rendered the textures in Adobe Substance 3D Painter and used NVIDIA Iray rendering technology for a faster, interactive creation process. Thanks to RTX acceleration, it was able to quickly prepare environment intersections and other texture maps used in texture rendering before textures are imported and applied to models in Unreal Engine 5.

The final heavy lifting was done quickly with Drago’s GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER GPU. Drago mainly emphasizes the necessity of the graphics card here.

“Besides the planning stages for a 3D artist, most of the work requires GPU acceleration,” Drago says. “Being able to work on scenes and objects with real-time rendered material and lighting saves a lot of time and avoids problems compared to wireframe or shadowless modes.”

Drago then proceeded to import and merge textured models into Unreal Engine 5. Once satisfied with the montage, he started the lighting process. Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen technology allowed Drago to repeat lighting in real time without having to wait for install or render times.

Unreal Engine’s virtual reality framework enabled Drago to install a virtual camera with motion tracking. This gave the animation a third-person perspective, allowing the artist to move through the creative space as if they were holding a smartphone.

After the calculation and animation were completed, Drago imported the scene into Adobe Premiere Pro software, where he added sound effects. Sharpen image details in animation using one of the many GPU-accelerated features in the software. Then Drago implemented GPU-accelerated encoding (NVENC) to speed up final file export.

Subtle changes allowed Drago to create ultra-realistic images. “Imitating a contemporary smartphone camera with limited dynamic range, flare and sharpening effects was a good way to present realism,” says Drago. “RTX features like DLSS and ray tracing are great for developers and gamers alike.”

Drago recently imported the work of Etchū-Daimon Station into the NVIDIA Omniverse environment, a 3D co-editing design platform that replaces linear pipelines with live sync rendering. Drago draws attention to the enormous potential of the Omniverse Create app, describing it as “a powerful tool that can produce extremely accurate results”.

Source: (BYZHA) – Beyaz News Agency