NVISII - NVIDIA Scene Imaging Interface

NVISII is a python-enabled ray tracing based renderer built on top of NVIDIA OptiX (C++/CUDA backend). The tool allows you to define complex scenes: 3d meshes, object materials, lights, loading textures, etc., and render them using ray tracing techniques. A scene can be described in many ways, you can use our simple mesh definitions, use multiple obj files, or load a complex scene defined in an obj file. NVISII can be used to export metadata about the scene, e.g., object segmentation. For more information see our ICLR workshop 2021 paper.

Documentation and quick tutorial.

Installing

We highly recommend that you use the pre-built wheels for python as follow:

pip install nvisii

Also make sure your NVIDIA drivers are up to date (default set at R460). We offer different nvisii packages for different NVIDIA driver versions. R435 pip install nvisii==1.x.70, r450 pip install nvisii==1.x.71, or R460 pip install nvisii==1.x.72 which is the default version. If you need more information about how to install NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu please consult this.

Getting Started

We wrote different examples covering most of the functionalities of NVISII, here. You can also find more extensive documentation here.

Building

Exact commands used to build NVISII can be found in .github/manylinux.yml and .github/windows.yml. More information on how to build will be added in the near future.

Docker

Here are the steps to build a docker image for NVISII.

cd docker
sudo sh get_nvidia_libs.sh

Since the CUDA docker image includes limited libs, this script adds the missing one for NVISII to run. This could potentially cause problems if the docker image is deployed on a different system, please make sure the NVIDIA drivers match on all your systems. This also implies that you should check which version of NViSII to install, see above.

docker build . -t nvisii:07.20

You can run an example like follow, make sure you change /PATH/TO/NVISII/ to your path to the root of this repo.

docker run --gpus 1 -v /PATH/TO/NVISII/:/code nvisii:07.20 python examples/01.simple_scene.py

This will save a tmp.png in the root folder.

Citation

If you use this tool in your research project, please cite as follows:

@misc{morrical2021nvisii,
      title={NViSII: A Scriptable Tool for Photorealistic Image Generation}, 
      author={Nathan Morrical and Jonathan Tremblay and Yunzhi Lin and Stephen Tyree and Stan Birchfield and Valerio Pascucci and Ingo Wald},
      year={2021},
      eprint={2105.13962},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV}
}

or

@misc{Morrical20nvisii,
    author = {Nathan Morrical and Jonathan Tremblay and Stan Birchfield and Ingo Wald},
    note= {\url{ https://github.com/owl-project/NVISII/ }},
    title = {{NVISII}: NVIDIA Scene Imaging Interface},
    Year = 2020
    }

Requested features

• texture.set_translation() and texture.set_rotation() functions for more randomization opportunities (issue 106, 140)

• material.get_XYZ_texture() functions, which would be useful for when importing things like OBJs, then wanting to modify their textures (issue 141)

• Vertex colors are currently unused. The vertex colors should multiply with the base color. Useful for molecular visualization. (issue 133)

• render_ray_data function, loosly following render_data but for only one ray. would be useful for querying certain pixels or objects, ray casting calls, etc., (issue 129)

• Directional light sources. An entity with a transform and a light component whose type is directional, and with no mesh component. Only the transform rotation would be used. Not sure yet how a directional light with a mesh component would work... (issue 124)

• Ability to construct one component as a copy of another (issue 100)

Extra examples

Falling teapots

Falling objects dans une salle de bain

Random camera pose around objects