In the world of digital production, some amazing advancements have taken place. Due to the advent of Disney Plus (https://www.disneyplus.com/en-gb/), that has recently taken the UK by storm, thanks to the great marketing and launch during the COVID-19 lock-down, fantastic content is now available at your fingertips.

The massive finance and production mastery of Disney had always included innovations. One of the most popular tv shows of the Disney Plus Originals category is The Mandalorian. The trailer can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmI7WKrAtqs. In the trailer, there are amazingly crafted scenes with beautiful 3D models and wondrous digital environments where the action takes places. One amazing trick of such production has always been incorporating the 3d elements ( e.g Iron Man flying through New York City) into 2d plates that have been shot. A lot of lighting information is gathered as references using Crystal Balls, during the shoot of the clean plates. Later, when the 3D elements are in the process of being incorporated into the 2D scenes, the lighting is matched so that they look like they both belong in the same scene. It is a major fete of compositing that makes this possible.

A lot of you guys have been using Unreal Engine for sometime now. With the ‘holy-alliance’ of Quixel Megascans (https://quixel.com/megascans/home) with Unreal Engine, things have actually become space-age on so many levels. In partnership with Industrial Light & Magic, they have managed to put together real-time renders for ‘video-wall’ technology through Unreal Engine. This would create backdrops of the big, beautiful world of Star Wars by pumping astonishing visuals into a room rendering it to become a stage where the story takes place. The benefits? This setup completely surrounds the peripheral vision, aiding the viewer to experience a perfectly working and may I add, seamlessly complimenting environment without all the hassle of post production tracking, replacing and set-extension procedure. The set does it all. Thus paving the way for Virtual Production. And oh yes. It does manage to eradicate a lot of the procedures for matching lights too. Happy days.

More on this has also been covered by the fantastic guys at Corridor Crew. Please check out their YouTube channel. It’s amazing!

So, what does it mean for one of the biggest in the yard, Autodesk Maya?