Virtual sets in Mandalorian - VFX & Unreal engine

Green is the color of visual effects for a long time now green-screen has been and is the main tool for creating some spectacular shots and placing actors in some fantastic scenes But recently with technology advancements something new started to be used replacing green and blue screens virtual sets And I like to tell you a bit more about this technology and how it was used in the production of the Mandalorian Well-prepared green or blue screenshots are today an easy way of replacing backgrounds and creating set extensions It's a proven technique that can deliver amazing results But it also has some weak points First of all, you have to very carefully prepare lighting on set Especially if you're shooting in studio to match the light of your final scene in order to achieve believable resolves That can sometimes require changing the light setup from shot to shot or have the light sources visible and interfering with foreground elements Green-screen also casts a lot of green spilled on the actors Then it all requires, of course good compositing to seamlessly blend the footage with a new background Recently however, a new solution gains popularity Which requires almost a no post-production the whole process is finalized onset I'm talking about virtual sets which have been extensively used for the Star Wars Mandalorian series In this case since there's real things on the set We have real cameras and real people the sets are bigger than they were on Jungle Book but it's essentially the same formula and now instead of having a green-screen they have to move around in light which took forever and that Was really the frustration that led to these innovations which is how could we do that without green screens next time? And so that led to do you have a green a green stage you have? Pre lit green areas that you could expose and and then it turned into these video walls where you could have green just behind the actor and an Interactive light which we used on Jungle Book also for shadows and things on the characters if we took all the technology that I've been Messing around with from all those other projects and applying it to a very specific application that would work for this This is an example of a virtual set shot How does it work the whole set is surrounded with a huge LED screen? Which is displaying a prefered earlier background There's even a screen above the actors to simulate sky But what's more interesting is that the camera movement is being tracked live and the background is Changing real-time to simulate parallax effect, which would happen while moving a camera in real environment That was possible thanks to using unreal game engine unreal together with Lux Machina studio recently presented a case study of this technique a Huge benefit of this method is that the screens provide lighting and Often no additional light sources are needed You get beautiful kind of natural light and reflections of the environment For mandalorian the VFX team Only had to even out very slight color differences between the real part of set and screen when both were visible First however, they had to solve a typical problem of filming screens: the moire effect Which can be visible while shooting a sharp image To get rid of it a combination of right led size Adequate camera sensor and lenses had to be applied The use of Unreal Engine allows to make quick changes while shooting you can easily alter lighting elements of the background or completely change the environment Seeing the final result while filming helps making creative choices and creating an artistic vision Virtual sets provide even more possibilities You can switch small part of the screen to be a green screen You still have the natural lighting and the environment reflections But now you can add some additional CG elements between the actors and the background The missing part of the background can be rendered as a separate pass to easily restore it in post-production Or you can replace the green-screen with a background rendered in higher quality than the one used on set One can see virtual sets as a modern version of rear projections a practical effect used in filmmaking almost since the beginning of cinema However here with all the new technology behind it. The results are just stunning Entering the next level of realism The new technique together with Jon Favreau's drive for innovation once again put Star Wars franchise in the forefront of VFX development while still staying true to its practical effects tradition It's one of those things that keep VFX and filmmaking an exciting experience Thank you for watching Please share your comments below and subscribe to never miss new videos about VFX and its history

Channel: VFX Geek

Views: 627,902

Rating: 4.9336152 out of 5

Keywords: VFX, mandalorian, star wars, unreal, virtual set, special effects, rear projection, making of, behind the scenes, green screen, movie magic, filmmaking, jon favreau, compositing, real time, game engine, epic, breakdown, ILM, virtual production

Id: tpUI8uOsKTM

Length: 7min 2sec (422 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 09 2020