Journal-Page03

MINIATURE VIRTUAL STUDIO BUILD AND TESTING

MAY 28, 2021

BY: VISUAL EDGE TEAM

With help from Epic Games and Ember Films, we spent several months building a fully functional miniature dynamic light led volume using 86" 4k HDR TV's to create a studio for shooting products, animals and miniature scale scenes.

And so far we've had really great results. Using a whiskey bottle to show the realistic reflections and a small amount of practical set we were able to really get genuinely good results in-camera much in the same way the big LED volumes from the likes of ILM and DNEG are achieving.

We wanted to see how effective it would be and if using it for product promo shots would be achievable.

"The results from this test show just how effective this flexible and cost efficient mini studio setup can be."

Rob Currie

We used a standard tracking system on top of one of Ember Films Red camera's and with a small amount of practical set, some additional soft light and a small tabletop dolly system we re-created a Scottish highlands scene. We used unreal engine 4.26 and Ndisplay to render real-time HDR 4k natively to the 3 display screens running on 2 unreal servers.

The whole thing was a great learning experience for all of us and we're hoping to progress the setup to using a small robot arm for the next set of tests. Watch this space for more...

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