All articles tagged with #virtual production
The article ranks the 25 best U.S. film schools in 2025, highlighting their facilities, curricula, and alumni achievements, with a focus on emerging technologies like virtual production and AI, and noting the importance of alumni networks and industry partnerships.
Unreal Engine, developed by Epic Games, is transforming entertainment by being used in theme park rides like Disney's Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, TV shows such as The Mandalorian, and movies including Predator: Killer of Killers and the upcoming Rogue Trooper, enabling more immersive, cost-effective, and innovative experiences across the industry.
Len Blavatnik’s family foundation donated $25 million to USC's School of Cinematic Arts to establish a virtual production center with advanced LED stages, aiming to train students in cutting-edge filmmaking technology crucial for the future of the entertainment industry.
Epic Games introduced a Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework with Unreal Engine 5, and artists have been experimenting with its capabilities, including setting up procedural crowd systems. Unreal Technical Artist Jim Bachalo recently showcased a crowd system that can generate large crowds of people in real-time, utilizing Vertex Animation Textures to make their animations lifelike. While the system is currently for personal experimentation, it has potential applications in virtual production.
Chaos, a German visualization tech developer, is working on Project Arena, a high-quality real-time renderer aimed at revolutionizing virtual production by offering a more cost-effective, efficient, and higher quality option for creating 3D scenes on LED screens. By combining V-Ray ray tracing with new technology, Chaos aims to provide a more accurate representation of lighting and cameras in real time, allowing filmmakers to focus on creativity without being disrupted by technology.
"Chicken Run 2: Dawn of the Nugget" is a sequel 23 years in the making, using cutting-edge technology and virtual production to handle the larger scale of the story and production. Aardman Animations turned to digital tools and virtual production to create the film, while still respecting the limitations of stop motion animation. The film follows Ginger and the chickens as they face a new threat to chickenkind: nuggets. With advancements in technology and materials, the production process has become faster, allowing for an average of one second of film to be completed per day. Despite some casting changes, the animators maintain the same acting and mannerisms for the characters.
Unreal Engine 5.3, the latest version of Epic's game engine, is now available for download, featuring enhancements to core rendering, developer iteration, and virtual production toolsets. The update introduces experimental rendering, animation, and simulation features, including cinematic-quality volumetric rendering, orthographic rendering, a Skeletal Editor, panel-based Chaos Cloth, and support for SMPTE ST 2110. While the engine has been used in impressive games like Layers of Fear, Remnant II, and Immortals of Aveum, the latter suffered from disappointing performance, with DLSS 3 causing significant ghosting issues. A fix is expected to be released soon.