Virtual Production Eliminates Guessing for VFX

Virtual Production provides a solution to one of the biggest problems in a traditional production workflow with what is referred to as a lossless pipeline. Assets that are made at the beginning of a film are now being carried through to final pixel.

At the beginning of a film you have the art department, previs, VAD and VFX all working together to build the assets inside of the Unreal Engine. They may not look perfect in the beginning but they are designed so that they can be cleaned up at every stage as the movie continues to be filmed. They get polished. Textures are added. They are not thrown away and will never be thrown away. You build assets once. You build them in a way that allows them be cleaned up and polished along the way.

Let’s say a film is modelling a beautiful, state-of-the-art museum. None of the shots have the ceiling in them, but the director now wants to add some ceiling shots to a scene. In a VP workflow, a location scouting team was sent to lidar scan the museum so that they have 3D versions of the entire museum, including textures and colors. These 3D scans are then uploaded to the Unreal Engine. Although a ceiling for the museum has not been built, the team has all of the information and imagery that they need to create a replica of the ceiling. In a traditional pipeline, the Art Director is already off the film and on to their next project, making them unreachable. This means the VFX team has to guess what they think the ceiling would look like or the director doesn’t get to add the ceiling. A Virtual Production workflow eliminates guessing and ensures that a director’s vision will be brought to life.