Zach Mulligan, founder of ZOPStudios, has built a career in animation, contributing to projects like The Bad Guys, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, and The Flash. Despite those successes, one project remained unfinished: New Venice, a passion project set aside in his college years.
His original plan was to create a traditional 3D animation, but his hardware couldn’t keep up. Small lighting or animation tweaks required minutes of waiting to see results. Collaboration was just as difficult. Working with classmates meant dealing with different software, and sharing files required time-consuming conversions that introduced errors and slowed progress. The project stalled for years, but the vision remained.
After working at major studios and refining his skills, Zach returned to New Venice with a goal of rebuilding it as an interactive VR experience. A project of this scale required real-time rendering, high-resolution assets, and a collaborative workflow, but his setup couldn’t handle the computation requirements.
That changed when he upgraded to a Dell Precision 3680 Tower configured with a powerful NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPU and paired with the NVIDIA Omniverse platform. The production pipeline he once struggled to build now runs efficiently thanks to NVIDIA’s specialized architecture. Dedicated ray-tracing at 90 fps in VR and 18,176 CUDA cores offer real-time rendering that maintains the high frame rates necessary for comfortable VR experiences. NVIDIA’s technology is revitalizing a dormant project into a scalable VR studio.
Cutting Render Times from 90 Seconds to Four Seconds
In his early attempts to complete New Venice, preview renders took over 90 seconds per frame. Every animation adjustment meant stopping everything and waiting to see if a change worked. That process slowed his ability to refine movements, lighting, and camera work. Now, with the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada, the professional-grade GPU maintains consistent performance under sustained workloads. Rendering each frame now only requires four seconds.
A single frame might not sound like much, but over time, the savings add up. A short animation sequence requiring 500 test renders previously took 12.5 hours to preview. Now, that same process finishes in 33 minutes. Zach no longer needs to think twice before making changes.
“Instead of waiting for a single frame to render, I can make quick changes and see results immediately,” Zach said. “That keeps the momentum going. I don’t have to plan around long delays—I just work.”
Collaboration Without Bottlenecks: How NVIDIA Omniverse Keeps Artists in Sync Across Tools
Bringing in other artists used to mean extra work for Mulligan. A lighting artist working in Unreal Engine might need to consume files created by an animator using Maya, causing delays and versioning issues. Each change required careful coordination to avoid breaking assets. Those issues disappeared when Zach adopted NVIDIA Omniverse and a Universal Scene Description (USD) based pipeline.
Before upgrading, working across different software required manual file conversions. If an animator finished a shot in Maya, Zach had to export it, convert it to work with Unreal Engine, and then send it back for review. The process added hours of work per scene, slowing production and increasing the chance of errors.
With NVIDIA Omniverse, those steps are unnecessary. Artists work in their preferred software, and their updates sync automatically. Animators in Maya, modelers in Blender, and lighting artists in Unreal Engine can collaborate in real time without file conversions.
“My lighting artist can work in Unreal Engine while my animator uses Maya, and they don’t have to stop and export files back and forth,” Zach said. “Omniverse updates everything automatically, which makes the entire production process easier.”
Building a VR-Ready Production Pipeline
New Venice, Mulligan’s resurrected passion project, draws inspiration from German Expressionism, film noir, and early silent cinema, blending classic storytelling with modern production techniques. Zach sees a connection between early filmmaking experiments and today’s VR landscape. “The first audiences to watch kinetoscope clips were amazed because no cinematic language existed yet. VR is in a similar phase, where creators are still figuring out how to best use the medium.”
VR storytelling, however, adds to the challenges in bringing an artistic vision to life. It demands a technical pipeline that can support real-time performance, high-resolution textures, and dynamic environments. The NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada enables this through its 48GB of VRAM, allowing Zach to work with large scene files and high-resolution assets in Unreal Engine without slowdowns.
The Dell Precision 3680 Tower is the backbone of the pipeline, providing the CPU performance and memory bandwidth needed to handle complex animation tasks without bottlenecks. Large VR scenes require rapid access to assets, and the workstation’s high-speed PCIe storage ensures that files load instantly, keeping the creative process uninterrupted.
Bringing New Venice to Life with NVIDIA and Dell
Zach Mulligan no longer needs to work around hardware limitations. The Dell Precision 3680 Tower and NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPU have cut render times by 96%, allowing him to refine animations without breaking focus. Faster iteration has changed how he approaches the creative process, giving him the ability to make adjustments in real time instead of waiting for his system to catch up. NVIDIA Omniverse has also eliminated workflow bottlenecks, keeping artists in sync across different software like Maya, Blender, and Unreal Engine without time-consuming file conversions.
“This setup makes independent animation at a professional level realistic,” Zach said. “I don’t have to compromise on quality just because I’m not at a big studio.” With New Venice moving toward completion, his workstation and production pipeline are doing more than finishing a film. They are proving that independent animators can operate at a studio level without sacrificing performance.
For updates on New Venice and more from ZOPStudios, visit their website. To learn more about Dell Pro Max PCs¹ powered with NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs, click here.
1Dell Pro Max PCs, previously referred to as Dell Precision workstations
