As a co-founder of dRaster, Andrew Johnson has enjoyed programming game and VFX pipeline tools for as long as he can remember. Throughout his career Andrew has worked at various software companies including Autodesk. At dRaster, his company’s custom studio tools have been used on many major feature film and game productions. Most recently he and fellow co-founder Arash Keissami were honored to present their work during Real-Time Live! at SIGGRAPH 2019

Nira is a time-saving asset review and collaboration platform capable of rendering massive 3D production files in real time for interactive web-based viewing on any device, including lower-powered mobile smart phones and tablets. Nira is useful for media and entertainment, product design, engineering, and other market segments needing to inspect, iterate on, and organize 3D and 2D digital assets.

Mindful of the countless hours of lost productivity waiting for digital asset files to load, Andrew’s team paid special attention to minimizing load times. Their results were dramatic: a sub-second for tens of millions of triangles, seconds for hundreds of millions of triangles, and tens of seconds for billions of triangles. Nira maintains full navigation interactivity even for assets that exceed billions of triangles.

To swiftly identify and resolve issues with digital assets, Nira provides a very powerful 3D viewer that includes scene debugging and inspection modes and intuitive camera navigation using mouse, keyboard, touch, or AR. Nira also supports multiple renderers, including Unity, Arnold, V-Ray, and Blender Cycles. Stakeholders can visualize assets using whatever engines they use in their pipeline, giving them the ability to conduct reviews that match their real-world results.

Nira employs a number of innovative features so that production assets can load quickly for interactive viewing:
● A custom server-side asset ingestion pipeline
● A custom server-side real time renderer especially tuned for interactivity on large assets and various visualization modes for inspection/validation of various asset metadata
● A collection of intuitive markup and review tools
● Existing hardware video encode/decode capabilities of both server-side and client-side devices.
Assets are provided to Nira via web drag-drop or via an API, which allows organizations to integrate Nira into their existing asset pipelines and asset management tools.

Andrew took time out from his busy development schedule to share how he first got interested in programming, how they grew up to form their own company for pro-level design tools, and where he sees graphics technology trending.

Tell us what inspired you to get into technology, and graphics in particular.
As a kid, I was always into 8-bit and 16-bit console videogames. My interest in computing was sparked at age 9 or 10 when my Dad bought me my first PC -- a Tandy Sensation with an Intel® 486SX 25MHz with 4MB of memory. The PC was actually a floor model at Radio Shack, so I was ecstatic to discover that it had several games already installed: Space Quest 4, Wolfenstein 3D, and a few others. From there, my fondness for video games only grew, and it wasn’t long before I was modding games to add maps and writing macros to help automate the process of getting more items. That was probably my first foray into programming, as the macro languages were usually something like a cross between BASIC and batch file scripting. Even though only a few of my friends were using my scripts, it was exciting to see those primitive tools help get things done.

Fast forward to today, and I’m still creating tools to help people get things done. I think making those macros and levels left an impression on me that stuck. Around the same time as all of this, my great friend Arash introduced me to a new 3D application called 3ds Max – version 1.0 at that point – and that was the gateway into the whole world of digital content creation and graphics. Arash and I have been working together on software projects in some way for the past 20 years or so.

What graphics projects are you working on now?
I’m currently working on a project called Nira, along with Arash and Dario Manesku. Nira is a collaboration tool for creators. Artists, designers, and engineers can use Nira to easily review, track, and organize their digital assets all within a web browser on any device. What makes Nira unique is that it moves the work of rendering assets to the server. This allows for visualization of really heavy and complex assets even while using a resource-constrained mobile device like a tablet or phone. For example, a 3D mesh with billions of triangles can be viewed interactively without needing to down-sample the geometry or textures.

An example of a 3D-mesh for a crocodile made up of over a billion triangles

Can you share a technology challenge you’ve had to overcome in a project?
One thing we’ve set out to do with Nira is to save time during asset review – that’s the process where designers, directors, and others provide feedback so artists and designers can iterate on the visual look of an asset. This is often done by exchanging notes and comments. For this to work successfully, it's important that the assets they’re reviewing visually match how it looks in the other tools they’re using. So, if they’re using a 3D renderer like Unity, V-Ray, or Blender Cycles, they’ll often want an exact match to those during the asset review phase, all while maintaining interactivity. Furthermore, plenty of organizations use multiple tools for final output. Depending on the circumstances, they might even have their own custom renderers. Given that, we knew we had to have some easy-to-use integration layers for assets to be displayed in these various ways while also keeping the asset review process unified as a whole. It has been a technical challenge to build out something flexible and powerful enough to handle this, but I believe we’ve risen to that challenge.

Tell us about demoing your work at a recent event?
It was a great experience attending the Intel® Innovator Summit recently; I met a bunch of amazing people there. Also, I had the honor of delivering a presentation about our work and received some really useful feedback from other Innovators.

Andrew with fellow Innovator, Justin Lassen, at the US Intel Innovator Summit

What technology trends do you see happening in the near future?
There’s been a staggering increase of computing power in our pockets and in data centers, and a big trend will be figuring out what linear combination of those resources makes the most sense to solve different problems. This is not a unique idea, but I think we’ll be confronting it a lot more often and on a much larger scale than ever before.

How do you leverage Intel® technologies in your work?
I want to look at just about anything Intel does to help render large visual workloads. Intel® OSPRay, Intel® Open Volume Kernel Library (Intel® OpenVKL), and Intel® Open Image Denoise are all big ones. In fact, we already have an Intel OSPRay and Intel Open Image Denoise integration within Nira and that’s been a great experience. I also have some ideas that I’d like to try out later with the Intel® OpenVINO toolkit.

Example of an exploded diagram of a truck in Nira

How can Intel help you succeed?
By continuing to push the limits of efficiently handling large visual workloads interactively, and by encoding large numbers of video streams at low latencies.

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