VIRTUAL PRODUCTION: THE FUTURE


PRODUCTION/POST


Unreal Engine 5 and new features like Lumen and Nanite, which will help to further standardise workflows and bring additional realism into any project without as much processing overhead,” says Miles Perkins, Indus- try Manager, Film & Television for Epic Games. “I’m also really excited about the continued growth of content creation tools like Quixel Megascans and Capturing Reality for amazing photo-real assets and environments, as well as the 3Lateral and Cubic Motion teams who are reaching new heights with the MetaHuman Creator. All of these, put into the hands of creatives, are going to enable them to tell better stories with more efficiency and faster iteration.” Content creators have big appetites


for updates. “Performance capture is an area I am obsessed with, and love combining it with virtual production - so seeing the quality of the latest Optitrack cameras and the ability to run live mocap smoothly into Unreal is really exciting,” says McKenna. “It would be great to see more integration with the whole pipeline on-set.” “As good as UE4 is we still have


to pre-light,” says Whitlam. “As the software develops we should see great improvements in the realism of


true real-time rendering which will give us the ability to cue interactive lighting events. This will give directors the freedom to shoot more dynamic action scenes.” Another key player in


real-time 3D content (RT3D), Unity Technologies recently announced it was to acquire the tools, pipeline, technology, and engineering talent of Weta Digital. Bay Raitt, principal of UX design at Unity, says: “[The Weta Digital] tools have all been built to have as much memory as they need, and as much compute as they need, and they’re fast. The tools [work in parallel], you can take simulations and farm them out across multiple machines and artists can work interactively.” Raitt, who helped devise the facial


animation for Gollum in The Lord of The Rings while at Weta, is keen to share some of the possibilities leading from a combination of Unity’s RT3D focus and the high-fidelity asset creation pipeline from Weta. “If you have a real-time


visualisation tool that allows people on the virtual production using Gazebo


We need to focus more on how to make the assets available faster


Philipp Klausing DARK BAY


to see the final lighting on the iPad in front of the mocap actors while they’re shooting, it means they can start lighting on set with physical objects. And that increases not only the speed that they can produce, but the quality of what they’re getting; they’re iterating in context, and making better quality choices,” he says. “You’re seeing it the way the audience is going to


see it. “Weta is going to


continue to accumulate


incredible generic assets when they do a show,” continues


Raitt. “There’s an asset library that we’re working on, that’s not just rigid


rocks and static objects. It’s actual skeletons and rigs, and those deeper assets that can be destroyed and can be dynamic.” Enhancements to CG asset libraries


would certainly make a difference. “We need to focus more on how to make the assets available faster,” says Klausing. “How can we streamline the process, how can we unify the technologies so that everybody can just plug in. Content is a really big thing and it needs a lot of artists to create an asset for you. [As] you shift


Winter 2021 televisual.com 69


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