VFX software company Chaos has unveiled a new toolset that offers studios what it says is a faster, simple alternative to game engines for virtual production.
Project Arena utilises off-the-shelf NVIDIA hardware and ray reconstruction technology to quickly move 3D scenes from industry-standard creation tools onto LED screens without a slow data conversion process.
Artists build their assets, bring a V-Ray-authored scene into Project Arena and are then ready to start their virtual shoots, said Chaos.
Because its results are fully ray-traced, Project Arena can handle huge amounts of geometry, added the company. 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.
“Game engines helped kickstart a revolution, but many in the VFX industry still can’t access it,” said 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.”
