Nvidia blew us away at the GeForce Special Event with announcements about the ridiculously overpowered second generation of RTX graphics cards: the RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070. In the midst of that frenzy, Jen-Hsun Huang also announced some exciting advances associated with RTX-based software.

The Nvidia Omniverse Machinima app, built around the Nvidia Omniverse 3D workflow collaboration platform, is "an RTX-powered mixer app for video game storytelling." In other words, Nvidia offers a photorealistic path tracing-based engine designed to simulate light, physics, and AI with astounding physical precision to bring in-game creations to life.

The engine allows you to use the AI Pose Estimator to animate your character using your webcam, or use the Audio2Face feature to drive speech animation of your 3D character using your voice.

You all remember the intricate beauty of the truly sleek and sophisticated art forms that Machinima brought to our desktops in the early 90s. The glorious Gmod mixes and OG's Red vs. Blue series have mostly faded into the ages, but behind the scenes, creators are still working on shorts and even feature films.

Indeed, the wild, yet lovable art form we once knew is certainly not dead, and has slowly grown with advances in technology and software over the past two decades. It has evolved in terms of graphic quality, but perhaps not so much in terms of sense of humor.

The Omniverse tool is not the first of its kind, but is said to be more flexible than alternatives like Valve's Source Filmmaker. As a universal design tool with asset exchange and Universal Scene Description (USD) asset import capabilities, it puts a wealth of 3D game assets at your fingertips to create complete raytraced, cinematic wonders.

If you want to import your own assets, Omniverse Machinima also features connectors for the most popular third-party design software, including 3DS Max, Maya, Photoshop, and Rhino. Of course, Epic and Unreal Engine are also included.

Pricing and system requirements are still secret, but a beta release date is set for October 2020, and you can sign up here. It won't be long before we see films like "Combine Nation" reproduced in 8K...

God help us all.