The Virtual Production of The Mandalorian Season One

It's an exciting time. Unreal Engine is being used to great effect in things like The Mandalorian: ▶ this video The latest developments in large language models are another area interesting to me personally as a developer. Since the beginning of the video game medium, limitations in programming game AI have left video games stuck in a corner, where they use violence as the primary means of driving immersion, simply because it's just too complicated to model human-like behavior outside the domain of simple carnival games. Some games try and brute force their way around this by explicitly picking from a set of predetermined branching paths at predetermined critical moments. But the latest AI tools, first seen in stuff like the GPT-3 powered AI Dungeon , reveal that there will soon be new methods of maintaining a coherent story in a simulated game. We won't have to resort to violence and fancy carnival games for much longer.

The advances they've made in virtual production studio backdrops are amazing. Camera-linked floor-to-ceiling 180° LED screens and synced lighting is just amazing. The stuff they're able to do in The Mandalorian is incredible. Though once you know what to look for (the camo hiding the floor/wall seam) you can tell they're using it a bit too much. But still it's incredible. ▶ this video

Not so sure about post-production rendering, if anything movies are moving to real-time rendered CGI environments [1]. Unreal/Epic have been a big player in this space. [1]: ▶ this video

> I walked away from this (um, got up from the sofa) thinking Epic’s gambit is to push Unreal Engine 5 as a virtual movie set I think they have been doing this for quite some time already: ▶ this video

They apparently did a lot of the cgi in real time with an curved led wall and some version of unreal engine. They track the camera position so they can move the image on the screen to match properly and They only render high resolution what’s in the camera viewport and the other stuff just provides some nice realistic ambient light. ILM video: ▶ this video link

Take a look at how they filled the Mandalorian. Quite a lot of it was filmed inside a large video wall / cube. One of the big advantages for them was that it resulted in far more realistic lighting. ▶ this video

If you think this stuff is neat, there's a neat improvement on this using what are essentially video walls. Replacing the greenscreen removes the problems with green or white, and gives presentors/actors better idea of their space. Tom Scott did a quiz series showing off the technology, linked to timestamps where he explains things: link link link link See also roughly the same technique being used in the Mandalorian TV show: ▶ this video

This video has a lot of examples: ▶ this video Part of the idea is to do as much as possible in-camera, by rendering the virtual surroundings at a high enough quality to directly film them as the actors' backdrop. It's sort of like a wildly more advanced version of using matte painting backdrops. It also seems far better for actor immersion than green screen, as the people on camera get a live wraparound view of the virtual 'set'.

> That was done for lighting. I don't think that's correct, the ILM team presented this technology in a video: ▶ this video (paraphrased) "it was designed to both light the actors and be a background that we can photograph, so that we end up with real-time live pixels in-camera" Also from the article you linked: > If the content was created in advance of the shoot, then photographing actors, props and set pieces in front of this wall could create final in-camera visual effects — or “near” finals, with only technical fixes required, and with complete creative confidence in the composition and look of the shots. I'm not an expert in film terminology but it does not sound by any stretch that this was primarily about lighting.