Bringing Zorah to life: How Substance 3D tools powered NVIDIA’s ambitious tech demo

The creation of Zorah, NVIDIA’s latest tech demo showcasing the performance and features for the new Blackwell powered GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs, pushed the boundaries of real-time rendering and visual fidelity. The demo’s stunning environments and intricate materials use the latest GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs, AI-driven rendering techniques, and a solid texturing pipeline with the Substance 3D tools, all run on the flagship GeForce RTX 5090.

From generating procedural materials in Substance 3D Designer to creating highly detailed textures in Substance 3D Painter, NVIDIA’s Lightspeed Studios team used the Substance 3D tools to iterate rapidly, maintain consistency, and optimize assets for real-time performance. We talked with Gabriele Leone, director of the Lightspeed Content Tech team, John Sweeney, the team’s Art director, Pierre Fleau, who manages the 3D team and spearheads content production, and Alex Liu, senior Lookdev artist, about how NVIDIA brought Zorah to life, setting a new benchmark for real-time visual storytelling and celebrating the latest Zorah demo
released at GDC 2025.

Leone: Our team is Lightspeed Studios, a part of NVIDIA's Developer and Performance Technology group. We focus on a wide range of verticals, from technology development to synthetic data generation, rendering, graphics, and AI — particularly for gaming applications.

A big part of what we do is build technology in collaboration with other teams across NVIDIA. More often than not, this process leads to the creation of a demo that brings together multiple innovations into one cohesive showcase. These demos aren’t just about presentation; they serve as a crucial step in refining and integrating new technology as we develop it. In many ways, the technology itself dictates what the demo needs to be, and we adapt accordingly.

At the core of our mission is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in graphics. By leveraging both advanced neural rendering techniques and AI innovations, we aim to redefine the future of visual fidelity and interactive experiences.

Zorah

Leone: ""Zorah" is our tech demo created for the launch of the GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs. It was a major highlight of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s 2025 CES keynote, introducing the new Blackwell architecture. This was our most ambitious tech demo yet — combining cutting-edge technology with stunning art to push the boundaries of what’s possible.

At CES, Zorah was not only featured on stage but also showcased live on the show floor and to the media in attendance. The response was incredible. We highlighted neural rendering through some of the most visually stunning art we’ve ever created, designed specifically to demonstrate the power of this new technology. Every detail in the demo was crafted to showcase the innovations behind Blackwell and seeing it all come to life was truly rewarding.

Neural materials

Liu: Our goal with the RTX Neural Materials demo was to demonstrate how AI-accelerated rendering can enhance PBR textures and BSDF materials. We were able to render complex real-world visual phenomena that would typically be challenging to achieve traditionally in real-time.

We settled on two assets: first, an incense holder consisting of tarnished silver, patterned gemstones, lustrous wood, and dusty silk rope; second, a slubbed silk with multiple anisotropic specular lobes. We used Unreal Engine 5’s Substrate materials with layering of multiple Slabs to create every material listed above, and with the help of RTX Neural Materials, we were able to essentially “bake” these complex materials down to a neural representation that closely resembles the original materials while being able to run in real time much faster.

Given the project’s time constraints, as well as the need to work with RTX Neural Materials that was updating with new improvements on a daily basis, we tried to keep the overall asset workflow as non-destructive as possible. After the initial models were created by the art team, all subsequent model modifications were done in Houdini, and texturing was primarily done in Substance 3D Painter and Substance 3D Designer procedurally with minimal manual painting.

For texturing, we leaned towards a mask-driven workflow, allowing for more granular control when creating Substrate materials with multiple Slabs in UE5. Most masks were generated using a combination of triplanar projections and high-poly mesh maps baked right inside Substance 3D Painter.

Manual painting was done sparingly to accentuate certain details such as fingerprints on gemstones. An RGB Mask Sbsar was created in Substance 3D Designer to facilitate the export of RGB-packed masks inside Painter. This way, instead of taking up three User Channels and packing them into a single texture using Painter’s Output Template, anchor points can be added to any layers that need to be exported as masks and then quickly referenced inside RGB Mask to be packed into a single User Channel.

Substance 3D tools

Fleau: For texturing, Substance 3D provided a calibrated environment that worked seamlessly with Unreal Engine 5, allowing us to maintain efficiency and consistency inside of the team and all assets we created.

Substance 3D Designer was essential for creating tiling materials shared across the team in Painter. For example, stone surfaces were designed for reuse across all stone elements. We created multiple variations of the same material using procedural exposed parameters.

We also created floor tile elements that were later on displaced before being imported into the engine. Additionally, we used Designer to create sets of decals (e.g. dirt, soil, stains.) ensuring all elements blend together naturally.

Substance 3D Painter played an important role to achieve highly detailed textures on our assets. The ability to handle complex geometries, detailing asset texturing, and UDIM support was key in bringing our models to the level of detail we needed.

Liu: Substance 3D Designer was used extensively to create all tileable base materials needed for the neural material assets such as scratched silver and slubbed silk. In addition, it was used to generate more abstract utility maps with specific shapes and patterns needed for producing the gemstone asterism and wood chatoyancy effects inside UE5.

Substrate material setups were our first priority during production, firstly to ensure it is actually possible to achieve the effects we were looking for, and secondly to determine the types and quantity of textures needed. Having completed material setups early on, combined with the procedural texturing workflows in Painter and Designer, made it a breeze to iterate and adapt to evolving project requirements.

Texturing workflow

Fleau: Every asset in the project went through Substance 3D Painter, Designer, or Photoshop at some point during production.

Using Substance 3D was not a new process for us, as our previous productions had already followed a similar workflow. The difference this time was the scale of the environment and the level of detail we applied. We fully committed to using virtual texturing in Unreal, opting to bake everything uniquely rather than relying on shader functions to blend materials. Every element, from walls to floors, was supported by sculpted geometry and baked UDIMs.

Fleau: This piece of wall is one of the first we created for a first visual benchmark:

• First modeled and sculpted entirely in Blender.
• A set of tile materials have been created using Substance 3D Designer (Stone, Gold .) with multiple variations of details and exported to the Painter shelf.
• Texturing was done in Painter using a composition of multiple layers from base stone adding accents of gold and different layers of dirt and weathering to make the asset look like a real-life scan.
• Finally, the UVs were done using 6 x 4k UDIMs textures and exported to UE.

Substance 3D Painter Automatic UV Unwrapping

Fleau: For our metalwork ornaments, the Auto UV feature in Painter became a nice addition to our toolset. Some of our highly detailed assets would have taken a few days to unwrap manually due to their complexity. We tried the Auto UV feature in Painter, and in a few seconds, we had usable UVs that were good enough for texturing the asset.

While this wasn’t the case for every asset, Auto UV in Painter helped streamline our workflow for certain complex pieces, allowing us to focus more on finalizing the art rather than dealing with technical bottlenecks.

For example, these metalwork ornaments designed by our concept team have very small, intricate details that benefited from Auto UVs in Painter.

Art direction

Sweeney: First and foremost, we wanted to craft an environment that felt familiar and believable, but with enough unique elements that could serve as a baseline for a fantasy world we could continue to build on. We looked at Baroque style architecture for its ornate detailing and materials, and designed a space that could feel adjacent to a lot of historical wonders around the world. We also wanted to view this all through a cinematic lens and referenced a lot of films that take place during that period as well.

The concept artists started by exploring a range of the Baroque architectural elements in a few images that were then combined into one cohesive space. We also were working directly with our technical director and artists to ensure that the design elements and lighting were going to best showcase the new advancements in rendering.

There was also a huge emphasis on small details in the space. Knowing the fidelity we're able to achieve now, the team was able to focus on micro details that help create a better depiction of reality both from afar, and up close. We wanted to make sure that no matter where you look in the environment, there's some small detail or element that surprises you and pulls you in.

Pipeline

Fleau: Our process began with 3D concept art, allowing for a seamless transition into production. The 3D concept serves as a foundation for the environment team. Key hero assets are also sculpted, ensuring very high detailing from the beginning. From there, we built a 3D blockout of the entire scene to establish scale in the engine early on. This blockout was then broken down into modular pieces and individual assets, to better organize the production schedule and prepare them for better integration into the engine.

Every asset in the project has been individually modeled, sculpted, and textured, maintaining a very high level of detail. Our goal was to make every stone of this palace look as real and unique as possible. But also, to retain modeling and texturing details fidelity even in close-up.

To maintain this level of detail we used high texel density (2-4k texel density) using virtual texturing and Udims and very high polycount (as many as we needed to achieve perfect silhouette even on close-up) using our new RTX Mega Geometry technology.

We assembled the scene, added interesting compositions, decals, and VFX to make this place feel unique and immersive. Then we created multiple lighting scenarios, ensuring the environment felt immersive and visually stunning.

On Zorah, we used RTX Global Illumination to cast an unlimited number of dynamic shadows, and multi-bounce mirror reflections with NVIDIA RTX Path Tracing with the latest iteration of DLSS 4. All those technologies work together seamlessly in our Unreal Engine 5 integration.

By using the Substance 3D tools, NVIDIA’s Lightspeed Studios team was able to achieve an unprecedented level of detail and realism, all while maintaining an efficient, non-destructive pipeline. For more information, check out how the Substance 3D tools can elevate your projects, and stay up to date with NVIDIA’s latest resources for game developers.