A way to approximate complex lighting in ultra realistic renders.

All SH lighting techniques involve replacing parts of standard lighting equations with spherical functions that have been projected into frequency space using the spherical harmonics as a basis.

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~cs4162/slides/spherical-harmonic-lighting.pdf

Spherical harmonics as used at Weta Digital

https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-science-of-spherical-harmonics-at-weta-digital/

blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/03/18/omniverse-collaboration-platform/

developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-omniverse

An open, Interactive 3D Design Collaboration Platform for Multi-Tool Workflows to simplify studio workflows for real-time graphics.

It supports Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology for exchanging information about modeling, shading, animation, lighting, visual effects and rendering across multiple applications.

It also supports NVIDIA’s Material Definition Language, which allows artists to exchange information about surface materials across multiple tools.

With Omniverse, artists can see live updates made by other artists working in different applications. They can also see changes reflected in multiple tools at the same time.

For example an artist using Maya with a portal to Omniverse can collaborate with another artist using UE4 and both will see live updates of each others’ changes in their application.