Cerebral Lounge Testing Virtual Production/
We always love getting to play with new toys—particularly when they can increase the value we bring to our clients! Cerebral Lounge is testing techniques and workflows for Virtual Production, also known as Extended Reality, using Unreal Engine. Traditionally, VFX shots are recorded over a green screen and the environment is added in post through compositing. With Virtual Production, we can create live-action scenes on a virtual set, loading a previously designed environment into the gaming engine, allowing the background to react to the movement of the camera in real time.
Lee Konen, CEO of Cerebral Lounge’s parent company, Three Seas Inc., has been experimenting with the new equipment and can see the potential applications for the technology:
“We’ve all been pretty excited about what’s going on with Unreal Engine and the way it’s being used in production. Now we’re testing a setup just using an HTC VIVE system, a couple of Base stations on the wall, a Tracker attached to the camera, and a Sony LED—actually an OLED, a consumer Sony Bravia television mounted on the wall—pushing everything out of Unreal through end display and it’s rendering it out in real time on the Sony, treating it like a little miniature LED wall, if you want to call it LED Volume, and it’s working great!
We are able to render it out in real time, track to the camera, and when you put a few foreground elements in, you can see that it can really work and, on the small scale, it can be pretty cool. So, we’re hoping to take this and amplify it make it a little bigger, but for now we’ve been really happy with the progress we’ve made on the R&D side of working with Unreal Engine and using it for virtual production extended reality XR type virtual production. Pretty cool stuff!”
ABOUT CEREBRAL LOUNGE
Cerebral Lounge is a visual boutique that specializes in production and post production, delivering thoughtfully crafted creative for every medium. Cerebral Lounge is a Three Seas company, a collective of creative boutiques with studios in Baltimore and Washington, DC.