Lakehouse Virtual Production

I had been learning a lot about In-Camera VFX (ICVFX) and kept wanting to do my own shot. A class project finally gave me the time and resources to make it happen.

Although I had worked on ICVFX shots and live streams before, I never got as much hands-on time with the tech as I wanted. This project changed that. I got to set up a camera tracking system from scratch and operate the camera while moving through a scene I built entirely in Unreal Engine.

The Environment

I had recently gotten an auto landscape material that handles a lot of the heavy lifting for environment work. After generating terrain in Gaea, I found a spot that looked great with the auto material applied and built a small lakehouse scene using assets from a pack I had on hand.

Evening lighting version of the Lakehouse virtual production scene in Unreal Engine Night time version of the Lakehouse scene testing volumetric materials

I tested a few different times of day while building the scene. The image on the left shows an evening version, and the one on the right is a night version I put together after the project wrapped to experiment with volume textures and materials. The final shot used afternoon lighting to give me the best chance of matching it in the physical studio.