In April, the new $4.3 billion, 3,500-room Resorts World Las Vegas luxury destination launched its “Stay Fabulous” campaign with an immersive short film featuring Celine Dion, Carrie Underwood, Katy Perry, Luke Bryan, Tiësto and Zedd. Among the production’s key technology vendors was the Las Vegas-based virtual production and creative solutions studio Extended Reality Group (ERG). ERG built virtually tracked content and designed a hybrid Unreal Engine workflow for real-time visual effects for the Hooray Agency- and Psyop-created campaign.

Launched last year by founders Evan Glantz, Zack Kingdon, Keith Anderson and Patrick Beery, ERG has a roster of artists, integrators and production experts that invent new applications for XR, MR, AR and VR, extending reality in new dimensions. ERG’s offering includes Unreal Engine (UE) workflow optimization and creative services.

To support the vision of Psyop director and founding partner Marco Spier and his colleagues, ERG started by providing asset optimization of geometry and texture for LED volume production, based on models provided by Psyop. “In direct collaboration with Marco, we were tasked with doing all the scene building, lighting, and final touches,” Glantz says. “We were responsible for optimizing — and in some cases, creating — the content appearing in the volume, which is the space where the virtual-tracked content is presented for motion capture. In other words, the volume is comprised of the LED screens where the Unreal Engine technology renders all the complex visual effects shots in real time during the live-action shoot.”

ERG created models in Autodesk Maya, Maxon Cinema 4D, SideFX Houdini and Adobe’s Substance Designer. Those assets were then integrated into the UE environment volumetrically, where optimization largely focused on designing for geometry.

According to Beery, “This project’s high number of animation and lighting elements interacting together required a tight polygon budget to render everything at an acceptable frame rate. Our workflow allowed us to optimize and re-topologize these models to work well within Unreal and required us to model each component and environment accordingly to meet the industry standard for motion capture.”

Physical production took place at LA’s NantStudios with director of photography Matthew Jensen, ASC.

As part of its preproduction services, ERG created and programmed several different “baked” lighting scenarios for instant activation on the set. These addressed factors like various positions for the sun and incorporated effects such as “lazy God rays” with appropriate shadows.

“This approach of preparing baked lighting workflows saves a huge amount of time on set,” explains the project’s virtual lighting director, Alvaro Turino Grosso. “In settings like this, it allows us to give the director and DP content that is consistent across all playthroughs, which can be invaluable for blocking and rehearsals.”

Anticipating on-set demands for dynamic interactive lighting, Turino Grosso programmed full CUE to CUE and in-engine control via DMX. This allowed him to run both UE environmental lighting and physical lighting on the set using a grandMA3 lighting console. The results include the ability to make on-the-fly color adjustments and vary the speed of the pinball’s roll, among many others.

For ERG, Turino Grosso, Beery, and CG supervisor Darrion Granieri actively participated in the production, providing quality control during the rehearsals and shoot in concert with executives from NantStudios and Epic Games.

“Along with virtual production supervisor Lawrence Jones, Marco gave us an amazing set of references and concept art that helped us understand the goal of telling a dynamic story blending classic Las Vegas with the newest technology,” Kingdon adds. “In this case, the use of bold physical set pieces to bend the line between photoreal and surreal elements — what we call photo-surrealism — worked like a charm.”

Project credits also included senior technical artist Warrell Andrew, project manager Andrea Frey and a group of highly skilled animators that extends around the globe.