Hey there!
Lately, I've been diving into alternatives to Unreal Engine. Personally, I find Unreal's workflow a tad too convoluted for my taste, despite its top-notch rendering quality and performance.
My quest began when I encountered a specific challenge in TouchDesigner (TD) – creating a real-time realistic glass material with accurate distortion, which proved to be quite a headache.
That's when I stumbled upon the Omniverse environment, and let me tell you, it was love at first click – especially when it came to creating that elusive glass material!
So, I decided to replicate what one would typically do in an Unreal setup when integrating a render delegate for the scene, using OSC and NDI protocols.
Surprisingly, within a month, I managed to develop my own Omniverse plugin to handle OSC messages (yes, they're called extensions here too, sound familiar?). Plus, lucky for me, NDI was already available, thanks to some awesome folks in the community extension!
Compare this to Unreal, where setting up comfortably requires hours of tinkering... Here, I've got OSC auto-binding, CSV stage dumps (layer-based, just like TD's network), and a slick UI – including a custom lister – all neatly packed in less than 250 lines of Python code! That's insanely efficient!
Granted, it's not yet ready for prime-time commercial use; it's still in beta. But mark my words, this software could be TD's next best buddy.
Beyond its stellar render quality, I see immense potential for massive data visualization, leveraging TD's unparalleled efficiency in handling diverse datasets.
Take stage design, for instance – leave the heavy lifting of preparing DMX channels to TD and CHOPs (which, by the way, I really dig!).
And I'm not alone in my enthusiasm; check out this neat add-on someone else created: https://github.com/MomentFactory/Omniverse-MVR-GDTF-converter
Another highlight is PhysX5 – everything you need for real-time, accurate, robust physics simulation, exemplified by the "fire effect" demo at last year's Berlin meeting.
Sure, TD boasts compute shaders – which, I must admit, I'm quite fond of! But let's face it, I'm no mathematician or physicist; I'm just a nerdy guy who loves slick visual effects and detests wasting time on rendering!
I've invested a lot of time mastering TD, which has certainly propelled my career. However, there comes a point where the learning curve becomes overwhelming. So, why not leverage external tools that excel in what I need (probably 10,000 times better than what I could code alone)? Reinventing the wheel this time is simply not an option!
To wrap things up, here's a link to my Patreon post, featuring the first release of my plugin for OSC auto-binding and presets for Omniverse:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/td-omni-realtime-99068902
And if Patreon isn't your thing, shoot me an email (details in my public profile).
Cheers,
Simone Franco
