Intuitive virtual production tools for set and light editing
Jonas Trottnow, Kai Götz, Stefan Seibert, Simon Spielmann, Volker Helzle, Farshad Einabadi, Clemens K. H. Sielaff, Oliver Grau · 2015
This contribution describes a set of newly developed tools for virtual production. Virtual production aims to bring together the creative production aspects into one real-time environment, to overcome the bottlenecks of offline processing in digital content production. This paper introduces tools and an architecture to edit set assets and adjust the lighting set-up. A set of tools was designed, implemented and tested on tablet PCs and one augmented reality and a virtual reality device. These tools are designed to be used on a movie set by staff not necessarily familiar with 3D software. Further, an approach to harmonize light set-ups in virtual and real scenes is introduced. This approach uses an automated image-based light capture process, which models the dominant lights as discrete light sources with fall-off characteristics to give required fine details for close range light set-ups and overcomes limitations of traditional image-based light probes. The paper describes initial results of a user evaluation using the developed tools in production-like environments.