Chaos launches product for “VP without a game engine”

Chaos has launched Arena, a tool that allows for virtual production without the need for a game engine such as Unreal.

Arena can move 3D scenes from tools like Maya, Houdini, Blender and 3ds Max onto LED screens. Artists build the assets, bring a V-Ray scene file into Chaos Arena and they are ready to start their virtual shoots. Chaos is also working on USD and MaterialX support, and already supports TurboSquid, Evermotion and KitBash. 

Arena delivers fully path-traced quality renders in real-time, capturing lighting and blending virtual environments with physical sets. Because its results are fully path traced, Arena can handle an almost limitless amount of geometry. Chaos recently tested this while working on the short Ray Tracing FTW, which saw the team bring 2.4 trillion polygons to the screen for three days straight, without a single crash.

Arena is powered by Chaos Vantage, which supports NVIDIA’s DLSS 4 ray reconstruction/upscaling technology, a suite of neural rendering tools designed to boost FPS and image quality. By implementing DLSS 4’s new denoiser algorithm — built on an AI transformer model — users receive a noticeable improvement in the visual fidelity of wires, hairs and interior scenes without upgrading their current RTX cards. This boost ensures that after denoising and/or upscaling, users will see perfect anti-aliasing of objects and textures as fine as one to two pixels. 

Christopher Nichols, director of special projects at the Chaos Innovation Lab, said: “Virtual production has been transformative, but the current process is full of crashes and rebuilds that can cost studios thousands of dollars per minute. Arena will not only let artists use the same assets from pre to post, but adds in a level of real-time path tracing and stability that wasn’t possible before today. This is exactly what Hollywood needs to rein in budgets and kick off the next big wave of independent filmmaking.”