Exploring NVIDIA Omniverse – Lessons beyond Unity

Discover our first impressions of NVIDIA Omniverse as we explore the transition from Unity to OpenUSD for industrial Digital Twins. Learn about the challenges of FBX workflows, material and animation conversion, scene optimisation, and the best practices we're adopting to build scalable, next-generation 3D applications.

Introduction

At Luminous we’re actively exploring NVIDIA Omniverse as part of our evolution from traditional Unity-based applications towards enterprise Digital Twins, OpenUSD workflows and industrial simulation. Over the past week our 3D development team has been evaluating how existing Unity content can be transferred into Omniverse, what works well, what doesn’t, and what new opportunities the platform offers. This article summarises our initial findings and some of the lessons we’ve learned that other Unity developers may find useful.

Why We’re Exploring Omniverse

For over a decade we’ve developed XR applications in Unity, creating immersive VR training, operational simulations and Digital Twins for clients across oil & gas, manufacturing and infrastructure. As industry increasingly adopts OpenUSD as a standard for collaborative 3D environments, NVIDIA Omniverse offers an exciting platform for:

Enterprise Digital Twins
Industrial simulation
Robotics integration
Real-time collaboration
High fidelity rendering
AI-enabled workflows

Rather than replacing Unity overnight, we’re investigating where Omniverse complements our existing development pipeline. To understand why we are doing this check out our article Nvidia Omniverse Vs Unity for Digital Twins

The Biggest Lesson: FBX Isn’t Enough

Our first discovery was that moving assets using a traditional FBX workflow introduces far more issues than expected. Although geometry transfers successfully, much of the information that gives assets their visual quality and behaviour does not.

Typical problems include:

Metallic materials becoming dull
Incorrect shader appearance
Missing animations
Lost material properties
Manual reconstruction work

For simple models this may be acceptable, but for large industrial Digital Twins containing thousands of assets it quickly becomes impractical.

USD Should Be the Primary Workflow

The biggest recommendation from our testing is simple: Whenever possible, export directly to USD instead of FBX.

Using the NVIDIA Unity Connector allows much more information to be transferred correctly, including:

Physically Based Rendering (PBR) materials
Metallic and roughness textures
Better shader compatibility
Animation support
Improved scene structure

This dramatically reduces manual rework once assets reach Omniverse.

Understanding Material Differences

One common misconception is that Unity materials should look identical inside Omniverse. Unfortunately, they won’t. Unity and Omniverse use completely different rendering systems. Unity relies on its own shaders, while Omniverse is built around:

USD Preview Surface
MDL Materials
OmniPBR
OmniGlass

Because FBX only stores limited material information, many assets require either automatic conversion through the Unity Connector or manual rebuilding using Omniverse’s native material system. The good news is that once rebuilt, the resulting materials often produce significantly higher visual quality thanks to Omniverse’s advanced ray tracing capabilities.

Animation Requires More Planning

Animation was another area where we encountered limitations. The Unity Connector only exports animation attached directly to Animator components.

Several familiar Unity workflows are not transferred, including:

Timeline sequences
Playable Director tracks
Script-driven animation
Runtime generated movement
State machine logic
Cinemachine cameras

For production projects this means animation should be baked into Animation Clips before export wherever possible. Complex cinematic sequences may then need rebuilding using Omniverse’s own Sequencer and Timeline tools.

Scene Optimisation Becomes Essential

One feature that immediately stood out was the Omniverse Scene Optimizer.

Industrial Digital Twins often contain millions, or even billions of polygons.

The Scene Optimizer helps transform these heavy engineering models into environments that are much more efficient to render by:

Merging repeated geometry
Creating instanced objects
Reducing polygon counts
Removing hidden geometry
Optimising material usage
Cleaning animation data

For large CAD datasets this could become an invaluable step in our future pipeline.

3ds Max Continues to Play an Important Role

Many of our existing workflows already use 3ds Max between BIM models, Revit and Unity.

The Omniverse Connector for 3ds Max integrates well into this approach by allowing:

Live synchronisation
Direct USD export
Material translation
Animation export
Camera transfer

This means many existing modelling workflows can remain largely unchanged while outputting directly into Omniverse.

Built-In Cinematics and Lighting

Another area that impressed us was Omniverse’s rendering toolset.

Camera animation can be created using keyframes, the Sequencer and the Curve Editor, while the Movie Capture Tool produces high-quality rendered outputs.

Lighting options are equally impressive, including:

HDRI environment lighting
Sun and sky systems
Area lights
Mesh lights
Emissive materials
Physically accurate global illumination

For producing engineering visualisations and marketing content, these capabilities offer a significant step up from many traditional real-time workflows.

Our Key Takeaways

Although we’re only at the beginning of our Omniverse journey, several clear conclusions have already emerged. OpenUSD should become the preferred interchange format. FBX should be viewed as a fallback rather than the primary workflow. Materials and animation require careful planning before export. Scene optimisation is essential for large industrial projects. Existing 3ds Max workflows translate well into Omniverse.
Omniverse opens exciting opportunities for future Digital Twin development.

Looking Ahead

Over the coming weeks we’ll continue exploring additional areas including:

OpenUSD asset pipelines
AI integration
Robotics simulation
Physics workflows
Digital Twin interoperability
Enterprise deployment
Real-time collaboration

As we progress, we’ll continue sharing our findings to help organisations understand how Omniverse can fit into modern engineering and Digital Twin workflows.

Ready to Explore Industrial Digital Twins?

At Luminous we’re helping organisations transition from traditional 3D visualisation towards next-generation Digital Twins powered by OpenUSD, NVIDIA Omniverse and real-time data.

Whether you’re modernising an existing Unity project or planning a new enterprise Digital Twin, our team can help you build a scalable workflow for the future.

Get in touch to discuss your Digital Twin strategy or arrange a demonstration of our latest Omniverse developments.

Book an Operational Briefing