KARLSRUHE, GERMANY — Chaos (chaos.com) has unveiled Project Arena, an upcoming toolset that will offer studios a fast and simple alternative to game engines for virtual production. With Project Arena, artists will be able to move V-Ray assets and animations to LED walls in around 10 minutes, accessing production ray tracing with pipelines they are familiar with.
Chaos’ portfolio of visualization technologies include V-Ray, a physically based renderer; Enscape, a high-quality, realtime rendering and virtual reality plug-in; Corona, a high-performance photorealistic rendering engine; Cylindo, a 3D furniture product visualization platform for e-commerce; and Anima, a 3D/4D animation software for adding realistic people and crowds to visualizations.
Using off-the-shelf Nvidia hardware and ray reconstruction technology, Project Arena helps studios quickly move 3D scenes from industry-standard creation tools onto LED screens without a costly or slow data conversion process. Artists simply build their assets, bring a V-Ray-authored scene into Project Arena and they are ready to start their virtual shoots. And because these tools are production-ready, those artists can continue to utilize the same assets throughout the process with no do-overs or drops in quality. And because its results are fully ray-traced, Project Arena can handle an immense amount of geometry. Recent tests have already seen a quarter of a trillion polygons running at 60fps on a single GPU, which Chaos hopes to improve with the addition of more shader types.
These tests are currently being conducted on virtual production stages around the world while working on a new short that’s being created with Martini Giant’s Daniel Thron and Erick Schiele; cinematographer Richard Crudo; Mesh’s James Blevins; line producer Debbie Kennard and several other contributors. The film serve as a way to test this new technology, as well as a chance to make a comment on how technology often stands in the way of live-action filmmaking.
“Game engines helped kickstart a revolution, but many in the VFX industry still can't access it,” explains James Blevins, co-founder of Mesh and former post production supervisor of The Mandalorian. “Project Arena takes an essential part of the VFX toolkit - ray tracing - and makes it available in a virtual production volume, straight from Maya, Houdini or 3ds Max. No faking, no baking — just something that puts an artist's work directly on the wall."