Chaos has unveiled Project Arena, a tool designed to bypass game engines and bring full ray tracing directly to LED walls in virtual production. Instead of rasterizing scenes for real-time playback, Project Arena renders V-Ray-authored assets natively—no need for light baking, LODs, or optimization passes.
No Baking, No Rasterization—Why It Matters
Traditional virtual production relies on rasterized game engines, meaning real-time lighting is approximated using tricks like baked lightmaps, cubemaps, or screen-space reflections. This introduces artifacts, light leaks, and compromises dynamic lighting. With Project Arena, all lighting calculations remain physically accurate—true reflections, refractions, and global illumination are computed live on set.
By eliminating baking, artists can update assets without reprocessing textures or rebaking light data. Instead of waiting hours to convert a scene into a game-ready format, VFX artists can move assets directly from Maya, Houdini, or 3ds Max to LED volumes within minutes.
Real-Time Ray Tracing on NVIDIA GPUs
Project Arena runs on NVIDIA GPUs, leveraging ray reconstruction to maintain high performance. In testing, it handled scenes with 250 billion polygons at 60 FPS on a single GPU—without any pre-processing. The system preserves the original shaders, materials, and lighting setups, ensuring that what artists see in their DCC tools matches what appears on set.
Production-Ready or Experimental?
Chaos is testing Project Arena in collaboration with industry veterans, including The Mandalorian’s James Blevins and ASC cinematographer Richard Crudo. While early results are promising, studios should evaluate stability before integrating it into large-scale productions. Those interested can sign up for testing at the Project Arena page.
Project Arena could redefine virtual production, making high-end ray tracing the default for LED volumes. No baking, no rasterization—just real light, in real time.
