Chaos has unveiled Project Arena, a toolset offering studios a faster, simple alternative to game engines for virtual production. With Project Arena, artists can move V-Ray assets and animations to LED walls in around 10 mins, accessing production ray tracing with pipelines they know and trust.

“Game engines helped kickstart a revolution, but many in the VFX industry still can’t access it,” said James Blevins, co-founder of MESH and former post-production supervisor of The Mandalorian. “Project Arena takes an essential part of the VFX toolkit, ray tracing, and makes it available in a virtual production volume, straight from Maya, Houdini or 3ds Max. No faking, no baking—just something that puts an artist’s work directly on the wall.”

Utilizing off-the-shelf NVIDIA hardware and ray reconstruction technology, Project Arena helps studios quickly move 3D scenes from industry-standard creation tools onto LED screens without a costly/slow data conversion process. Artists build their assets, bring a V-Ray-authored scene into Project Arena, and they are ready to start their virtual shoots. Due to these tools being production-ready, artists can continue to utilize the same assets throughout the process (from pre to post), with no do-overs or drops in quality.

Because its results are fully ray-traced, Project Arena can handle an immense amount of geometry. Recent tests have already seen a quarter of a trillion polygons running at 60fps on a single GPU, which Chaos hopes to improve with the addition of more shader types.

Watch the video below to learn more about Chaos’ Project Arena.

These tests are currently being conducted on virtual production stages around the world while working on a new short that’s being created with Martini Giant’s Daniel Thron and Erick Schiele; cinematographer Richard Crudo; MESH’s James Blevins; line producer Debbie Kennard, and some surprise guests. The film will not only serve as a way to test this new technology, but a chance to make a comment on how technology often stands in the way of live-action filmmaking.

“Project Arena represents a huge step forward for cinematographers by allowing us to do our jobs more creatively, quickly, and efficiently,” said Crudo, a six-term past-president of the American Society of Cinematographers. “It delivers a much more precise method of accomplishing what up to now has been a generally cumbersome task. My eyes are always the final judge of what I’m doing, and my experience with it thus far has been thoroughly convincing. It’s destined to become the standard for all volume and LED wall work.”

The Chaos Innovation Lab is currently seeking production feedback on Project Arena. To influence where it goes next or learn more about its current capabilities, contact the Chaos Innovation Lab via the form on the Project Arena page.