NAB: Building virtual worlds

The fusion of games engine renders with live broadcast has taken virtual set solutions to another level with photoreal 3D graphic objects appearing indistinguishable from reality.

At NAB, all leading developments in this area come powered with Epic Games Unreal Engine. Originally designed to quickly render polygons, textures and lighting in video games, these engines can seriously improve the graphics, animation and physics of conventional broadcast character generators and graphics packages.

Every vendor also claims that their integration of Unreal Engine creates the most realistic content for virtual and mixed reality and virtual sets.

Some go further and suggest that their virtual production system transcends its real-time broadcast boundaries, providing real-time post-production and high-end content pre-visualisation for episodic and film market.

One of those is Brainstorm, the Spanish developer behind InfinitySet. The latest version of this software takes advantage of the Nvidia GPU technology and Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) for rendering. Nvidia’s SLI technology can connect several GPUs in parallel, multiplying the performance accordingly, so that InfinitySet can deliver…