Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/997232
F E A T U R E 10 cgw | e d i t i o n 2 , 2 0 1 8 OASIS DESIGNER HALLIDAY'S AVATAR ANORAK (MARK RYLANCE) LIVES ON IN VR. PARZIVAL AND ART3MIS VISIT A VR DANCE CLUB. were in London for five months. Whenever Steven [Spielberg] wanted something, we had an art crew there ready to bang it out and make it happen." Virtual Production Roberts began working with Warner Bros. to prepare the virtual production for Ready Play- er One soon aer finishing The Jungle Book. "The first thing we did was to set up a virtual art department at Digital Domain with eight artists and a supervisor," Roberts says. "They worked directly with Adam [Stockhausen] and Alex [Jaeger]." Once they received approved designs, the artists used Autodesk's Maya, Allegorithmic's Substance, and proprietary tools to create virtual sets, props, vehicles, characters, and environments that could run in a modified version of Unity's real-time game engine. Three of the artists moved on to London, the better to get immediate feedback, and given the time difference, the LA-based artists could make changes overnight. "One of the game changers on Jungle Book was that we could scout the virtual sets in VR," Roberts says. "It was even more so for Ready Player One. Alex [Stockhau- sen] and Steven [Spielberg] had HTC Vive headsets, and there was one in London, too. Being able to walk around in a virtual set was super useful; it gave everyone a real-world sensibility for lighting and placing things." To help Spielberg, the crew built a set of custom tools. While in VR, Spielberg could maneuver his avatar around the world by pointing to where he wanted to go and teleporting it there. A scaling tool allowed him to change his avatar's size to, for exam- ple, grow 200 or 300 feet tall for a bird's- eye view. With an annotation tool, he could point, draw, write notes, create arrows, and make targets. "We recorded all that during a scouting session," Roberts says, "all his comments and marks." While in VR, Spielberg's avatar could carry a virtual Alexa camera, and Spielberg could look through the viewfinder of this virtual Vcam, a virtual virtual camera, if you will. "It was like shooting in the real world," Roberts says. "He could look through the viewfinder and still see the virtual world with his peripheral vision." The low resolution of the headset meant, though, that when Spielberg was on set, he would use a real handheld Vcam instead. "We created a custom Vcam for him," Roberts says. "It was like the traditional iPad-based virtual cameras. It was more advanced and had higher resolution than the virtual virtual camera in the VR headset. When he used the Vcam, he was still con- nected to the physical world." On Set At Warner Bros. studio in England, the crew built two soundstages and four capture volumes. On one soundstage, there was a volume for performance capture of the actors who would be avatars in the OASIS, a calibration volume, and a "Vcam lounge" V I R T U A L R E A L I T Y