KNOWLEDGE FOR FREE

Chris Nichols of Chaos at the podium…

            On Tuesday I made my way to the Los Angeles Convention Center and took a stroll through Siggraph 2026, an event aptly described by its organizers as “The Premiere Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.”  Most of what was on display flew straight over my head; at least I had enough on the ball to absorb the broad strokes of what’s immediately possible in the post-production and special effects world.  All of it was amazing!

            The best moment was a presentation given by Chris Nichols, one of the principals of Chaos, a visualization and VFX software company, best known for V-Ray, a widely used renderer in film, television and animation.  His talk, which was exotically titled, Ray Traced Gaussian Splats in Production: The ‘June July’ Pipeline, brilliantly summarized the tech behind VidViz, Chaos’s experimental visualization front end process that precedes the Arena real-time virtual production pipeline.  Most simply, it gets a hero 3D asset onto an LED wall quickly, while keeping the workflow closer to normal methods and away from a game-engine-heavy approach.

            Its essence is speed without giving up photorealism.  Chaos’ tools do this by reducing setup time for lighting, materials, weather and scene iteration while preserving the look of a physically based render.

            For a traditional cinematography or virtual production workflow, VidViz looks less like a standalone toy and more like a bridge between content creation and in-camera final-pixel display.  It’s meant to help artists and production teams work with less technical friction than what’s caused by the usual pipelines.

            As I proofread this post, I realized I might know a little more about bleeding-edge technology than I thought I did.  The explanation I’ve provided here is as simple as I could make it, so if you got lost along the way…you’re still probably very smart.

            Full disclosure: June July is a forthcoming feature produced by Nichols and directed by Daniel Thron. In addition to being the cinematographer for that film, I’ve been closely involved with Chaos for all of their proof-of-concept projects over the past two-and-a-half years.  Nichols, Thron and company founder Vlad Kolyazov are brilliant technicians and incredible artists.  In a world of bluster and hollow promises, they are the genuine item and always deliver!

            If you can’t wait for June July’s release and wish to see an example of gaussian splats at their best, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vET6sHCq87o.  I previously addressed the tech in a post dated September 24, 2024 – Ray Tracing FTW.