Variety
In this exclusive feature, Variety explores Arena's potential to make virtual production more efficient, affordable, and high-quality with real-time ray tracing and seamless workflow integration.
Chaos Arena is a cutting-edge real-time ray-tracing solution for in-camera visual effects (ICVFX) on virtual production stages. As a cost-effective and user-friendly alternative to the traditional game engine workflow, Arena opens the door to virtual production for projects of all sizes—whether for small setups or large-scale productions.
It’s the fastest, easiest way to move 3D content from trusted pipelines to LED walls without preprocessing, carrying the same assets from pre-production to post. With Arena, filmmakers and content creators can make creative changes instantly on set, avoiding costly re-baking and reducing reliance on post-production fixes. It delivers fully ray traced quality renders in real-time, accurately capturing lighting and seamlessly blending virtual environments with physical sets. Designed to handle complex scenes with ease, Arena frees creatives from technical concerns, letting them focus fully on storytelling.
Chaos Arena is the quickest way to bring 3D content to LED stages, taking assets and animations directly from V-Ray pipelines to screen in as little as 10 minutes, depending on the scene. It puts the artist’s work directly on the wall, eliminating the need for preprocessing. Runs smoothly on contemporary hardware already installed at most LED stages.
Chaos Arena supports a wide range of industry-standard camera tracking protocols, including FreeD (i.e. Mo-Sys, Vive Mars, etc), Vicon, stYpe, OptiTrack, and EZtrack. Tracking data can also be saved in an Alembic file for flexible scene adjustments and post-production.
Chaos Arena is highly flexible, easily integrates with LED volume setups of any size, and offers seamless distributed rendering, including Genlock support via NVIDIA Quadro Sync. Dual GPU rendering is also supported for enhanced performance.
Chaos Arena supports widely adopted color management standards such as ACEScg rendering color space, HDR output, and soon OpenColorIO, ensuring consistency throughout the entire pipeline.
Arena is also adaptable for bespoke and less common camera tracking protocols.
Our team is available to discuss your specific setup, explore how Arena can be tailored for it, and answer any questions you might have.
In this exclusive feature, Variety explores Arena's potential to make virtual production more efficient, affordable, and high-quality with real-time ray tracing and seamless workflow integration.
In this befores & afters podcast, Chris Nichols and Ian Failes explore Arena’s groundbreaking real-time ray tracing, seamless V-Ray asset integration for LED walls, and its impact on modern filmmaking.
In this fxguide podcast, Mike Seymour and the team behind Ray Tracing FTW explore Arena’s impact on virtual production and the future of storytelling, how it enabled 30 setups in a standard 10-hour shoot day, and stunning in-camera ray-traced shots.
In this CG Pro Podcast episode, Christopher Nichols, Daniel Thron, and Erick Schiele discuss Arena’s real-time ray tracing capabilities, its seamless integration with industry-standard tools, and their experience creating Ray Tracing FTW.
Chaos Arena in action: Production-proven by industry veterans behind Justified, Avengers: Infinity War, and Dune: Part Two in the short film Ray Tracing FTW.
Ray Tracing FTW is a short film designed as the first major stress test for Chaos Arena.
The team used only 3 days of shooting on the LED stage and managed up to 30 setups in a standard 10-hour shoot day —a testament to Arena’s stability, efficiency, and ease of use. Arena performed flawlessly, bringing over 2 trillion polygons to the screen for three consecutive days without any costly crashes often associated with traditional virtual production workflows.
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Visit the Chaos Arena documentation page for everything you need to get started—from initial setup instructions to best practices. Set it up for your stage, save configurations for future use, and operate seamlessly—distribute scenes to render nodes, load scenes on stage, make real-time adjustments, and more.