This Week ‘Within the NVIDIA Studio’ ‘Portal: Prelude RTX’ Rejuvenates Legendary Gaming Mod

Editor’s word: This publish is a part of our weekly Within the NVIDIA Studio sequence, which celebrates featured artists, affords inventive ideas and methods, and demonstrates how NVIDIA Studio know-how improves inventive workflows. We’re additionally deep diving on new GeForce RTX 40 Collection GPUs options, applied sciences and assets, and the way they dramatically speed up content material creation.

The Portal: Prelude RTX gaming mod — a remastering of the favored unofficial Portal prequel — comes with full ray tracing, DLSS 3 and RTX IO know-how for cutting-edge, AI-powered graphics that rejuvenate the legendary mod for players, creators, builders and others to expertise it anew.

Nicolas “NykO18” Grevet, a software program engineer behind Portal: Prelude, collaborated with modder David “Kralich” Driver-Gomm to create the mission — which launched right this moment as a free obtain on Steam — utilizing NVIDIA RTX Remix. The free modding platform permits customers to rapidly create and share RTX mods for traditional video games. Study concerning the duo’s workflow this week Within the NVIDIA Studio.

Plus, this month, graphics card companions will start to supply the 16GB model of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GPU, that includes the state-of-the-art NVIDIA Ada Lovelace structure that supercharges inventive apps and productiveness whereas delivering immersive, AI-accelerated gaming with ray tracing and DLSS 3. The GPUs are well-suited for working in bigger 3D scenes, enhancing movies in as much as 12K decision and working native AI basis fashions.

All of that is backed by the July NVIDIA Studio Driver, which helps these newest updates and extra, out there for obtain right this moment.

As well as, the NVIDIA Studio #StartToFinish neighborhood problem is in full swing. Use the hashtag to submit a screenshot of a favourite mission that includes its starting and ending phases for an opportunity to be featured on the @NVIDIAStudio and @NVIDIAOmniverse social channels.

A Portal Into Creativity

Portal: Prelude‘s storyline revolves round what’s referred to as the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Working System, or GlaDOS, an AI created by Aperture Science, the fictional scientific analysis company key to the unique sport’s plot.

With additional chapters, take a look at chambers, challenges and an prolonged storyline, the most well-liked Portal mod of all time was acknowledged by Mod DB with a “Mod of the 12 months” award. Take a look at the unique sport trailer under.

“Modders must put on many hats — they’re concurrently degree designers, 2D artists, scripters, writers, internet builders, quality-assurance analysts and a lot extra,” stated Grevet. “This calls for resilience and adaptableness.”

Grevet and Driver-Gomm remodeled Portal: Prelude’s older, lower-resolution belongings into new, high-resolution belongings utilizing RTX Remix. Each creators used a GeForce RTX 40 Collection GPU, which enabled full ray tracing and DLSS 3.

The duo first gathered 360-degree screenshots of complete scene ranges with RTX Remix.

Subsequent, they used a part of RTX Remix referred to as RTX Remix Runtime to seize sport scenes and change belongings throughout playback whereas including RTX know-how to the sport, together with NVIDIA Reflex for low-latency responsiveness.

“We performed with AI upscaling so much,” stated Grevet. “It was tremendously useful in slicing down on early work and enabled sharper deal with the hero belongings that required extra hands-on therapy, like characters and non-playable character fashions, in addition to massive, predominant textures.”

These higher-resolution belongings within the OpenUSD format have been introduced into NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for connecting and constructing 3D instruments and functions, by way of the Blender Connector. This allowed the group to make use of their 3D app of alternative for modeling new geometry and beveling out edges, all in actual time, with full ray-traced constancy for ultra-photorealistic lighting and shadows.

“Some belongings have been virtually modeled from scratch, whereas others — like pipes — largely simply had their edges beveled out so that they have been larger poly and smoother,” stated Driver-Gomm.

The group then UV unwrapped the belongings, which is the method of opening a mesh to make a 2D texture that may blanket a 3D object for the exact utility of textures and supplies.

Grevet and Driver-Gomm then moved to Adobe Substance 3D Painter and Sampler to create high-quality bodily primarily based render fashions. This implies photos have been rendered modeling lights and surfaces with real-world optics. GPU-accelerated filters pace up and simplified materials creation, whereas RTX-accelerated mild and ambient occlusion baked belongings in seconds.

With all belongings in place, the group used RTX Remix to swap older ones with these newer, higher-fidelity fashions. However the creators weren’t able to relaxation on their laurels simply but — RTX Remix allowed them to relight each single degree with lifelike, path-traced lighting.

The ultimate results of Portal: Prelude RTX is “light-years forward of what I may do by myself,” stated Grevet. “Having the chance to remaster these ranges in the best way I would meant for them to look and behave was a pleasant cherry on high.”

“The RTX Remix software is insanely highly effective and virtually comes throughout as magic to me,” stated Grevet. “The power to seize any a part of a sport, load it in a 3D software and chip away at it as if this was being finished utilizing the unique sport’s degree editor is insane.”

Choose up Portal: Prelude RTX totally free for Portal house owners on Steam.

Take a look at Grevet and Driver-Gomm on Twitter.

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