Virtual production boost for disguise xR
New features for xR software have been announced by disguise. The company says the upgrade will further enhance its integration of Unreal Engine and address the continued demand for immersive content across extended reality (xR) and virtual production.
Features include ACES colour management, DirectX12 (DX12) and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) support from Nvidia, which can work together with 10-bit HDR processing of Unreal content through disguise RenderStream.
In the past year, disguise xR has featured in more than 200 xR productions in 35 countries in the broadcast, corporate and education space. It has powered immersive real-time productions for music artists such as Katy Perry and Billie Eilish, enterprise businesses like SAP and Lenovo, educational institutions like the University of Michigan, broadcast TV shows like MTV Video Music Awards and America’s Got Talent, and commercial brands like Nike and Under Armour.
ACES (the Academy Color Encoding System) integration means that users can now access its powerful workflow end-to-end through the disguise system, enabling unparalleled colour quality for motion picture images regardless of source, said disguise.
“In my last shoots I’ve been working with the ACES workflow, and the results have been really good,” said David Monguet of MO&MO Films. “This feature is a great tool for all of us in the production process – the VFX team has less work to transform the plates, and I have more dynamic range to adjust in the screens. I’ve been doing some tests with a colourist to compare and the conclusion is that it is working perfectly.”
disguise has also implemented a pipeline that supports Unreal Engine running DLSS – the Nvidia technology that enables content to be rendered at a lower resolution then up-sampled using GPU-accelerated deep learning model to reconstruct the image at the higher resolution.
The use of DLSS was pioneered by disguise partner Orca Studios – a virtual production and VFX studio in Barcelona. Orca adopted an early implementation of DLSS into Unreal Engine, which allowed it to get a critical boost in performance in the more demanding scenes with ray tracing global illumination that would otherwise not hit the noise and performance limits necessary for high-end productions.
disguise has also recently added DirectX12 support for Unreal Engine, unlocking advanced rendering features such as ray tracing allowing users to capture high-quality reflections, refractions and accurate shadows to deliver best-in-class photorealistic content.
RenderStream is a proprietary IP protocol that enables the hosting of Unreal content on dedicated disguise hardware. Joe Bleasdale, product manager at disguise, said: “This approach of scale-out rendering in conjunction with features such as DX12 support, DLSS and the ACES colour management workflow allows Virtual Production customers to pursue truly photorealistic scenes and content without compromising on creative delivery.”
“Our users are always looking for ways to deliver images of the highest quality, highest detail and highest frame rate but this is often constrained by the finite GPU power of their rendering system,” said Peter Kirkup, global technical solutions manager at disguise. “Our next release will introduce users to cluster rendering, an integration solution for Unreal’s nDisplay. With this we aim to do two things – simplify the configuration of render clusters and separate out the render clusters from the final pixel delivery machines. By separating those two, we are able to scale them independently so you can add more render nodes for more render power or add more output nodes if you just have a bigger canvas.”
For more information visit www.disguise.one
