Interactive Visualization Brings New Sites To Life with NVIDIA RTX and AI

Introduction

Studio 4D is an architectural visualization firm with over 10 years of experience. To help their client JBG SMITH, the lead developer of National Landing in Washington, D.C., create a high-quality visualization of their project, Studio 4D needed a powerful solution, one that could keep up with their design needs. With NVIDIA RTX A6000 and DLSS, Studio 4D created an interactive cloud-based 4D walkthrough that enabled JBG SMITH to gain deeper insights into the project and tell the complete story of National Landing.

One of Studio 4D’s clients is JBG SMITH, a leading owner and developer of high-quality, mixed-use properties in the Washington, DC area. JBG SMITH is the lead developer of National Landing, a large project currently being established in the United States. Located next to Reagan National Airport and The Pentagon, National Landing covers more than a square mile and has multiple projects that have been in development over a span of 10 years. To better understand and visually explain the full capacity of the National Landing project, JBG SMITH needed a solution that could meet all of their coordination, pre-sales and marketing, investment, as well as neighborhood and city zoning needs. Studio 4D helped JGB SMITH by digitally creating an interactive cloud-based 4D walkthrough of National Landing. The 4D walkthrough provides a “living” 3D environment with live-stream capability over the cloud. This allows developers to view realistic digital 3D models at their own pace, as well as simultaneously stream, modify, and present their models in real time to other stakeholders. With NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs and NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), Studio 4D and JBG SMITH visually told the story of their National Landing mega project and its opportunities.

NVIDIA RTX helped Studio 4D achieve real-time ray tracing throughout their design process, and the accelerated workflows with DLSS was a game-changer.

“NVIDIA’s DLSS algorithm really got the best out of the NVIDIA RTX GPUs, and helped us exponentially increase the image quality of our visualization services, especially in an extensive and intensive project the size of National Landing,” said Hilario Canessa, CEO at Studio 4D.

“This could not have been done without the hardware and software breakthroughs NVIDIA made available to us.”

Studio 4D’s GPU-accelerated renders and visualizations gave JBG SMITH the capacity to have holistic control of their urban design. It allowed the developer to see their project as a whole, both the micro and macro scale of National Landing, at the same time.

Now, JBG SMITH can save time in coordination meetings with vendors, consultants, pre-sales and marketing teams, and investment teams because the complete design is available months — or even years — before the actual construction, allowing them to show everything they plan to do in advance.

It’s also beneficial for neighborhood and city zoning meetings because instead of presenting a few renders that try to explain an entire project, the team can now visually present a 4D walkthrough to the committees and show all the aspects of their project’s impact.

“NVIDIA RTX and DLSS truly stood out in the market,” said Aaron Stopak, principal at Studio 4D. “There was no other GPU and software combination that allowed us to achieve real-time ray tracing. It’s a truly remarkable achievement by NVIDIA.”

NVIDIA RTX and AI allow Studio 4D to enhance their design and production workflows and create stunning, high-quality visualizations for clients.

With this advanced technology integrated into their current pipelines, Studio 4D plans to use NVIDIA Omniverse, an open platform for virtual collaboration and physically accurate simulation, to enhance future rendering workflows and design reviews.