ICE.ART 2026.II agenda is set

For those who don’t know the event: ICE.ART is an online event organised by vrbn, bringing together people working across 3D environments, animation, virtual production, architecture, real-time graphics and pipeline technology.

Three evenings of 3D

The ICE.ART 2026.II agenda is finalised, with three online evenings bringing together speakers from animation, virtual production, architecture, infrastructure, material workflows and real-time environment production. The programme runs from 8 to 10 September and combines two main presentations per evening with panel discussions and community chat. Or, put differently: quite a lot of pipeline territory without requiring anyone to find an airport lounge.

Register HERE for free.

Why animation is still difficult

The first evening looks at 3D environment visualisation technologies, beginning with Deborah Anderson and “It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature: Why 3D Animation Was Always Hard”. Production discussions have a habit of presenting every new tool as if the previous thirty years of animation difficulty were caused by an insufficient number of buttons. Anderson’s talk instead starts from the less comforting possibility that animation is difficult because animation itself is difficult.

Anderson is followed by Mazze Aderhold with “Virtual Production & Immersive Experiences: Requirements”. Here the emphasis shifts from producing movement to building the technical conditions in which real-time imagery can actually be used on set or inside immersive installations. Virtual production tends to photograph rather well, but behind every attractive LED wall sits a collection of distinctly less glamorous questions involving playback, synchronisation, tracking, content preparation, colour and system integration.

Aderhold, a sometimes Digital Production Author and our Guru for everything Virtual Production, works with ASSIMILATE, whose wider ecosystem includes real-time and virtual-production tools, so the session should be especially relevant to teams interested in what has to be in place before an immersive setup becomes a dependable production system rather than an impressive collection of hardware.

Architecture before polygons

The second evening moves into architecture and infrastructure, opening with ICE.ART head Matthias Buehler and “MasterClass: Architecture For 3D Artists”. For environment artists, architectural knowledge is one of those skills that becomes increasingly useful just after a building has already started looking slightly wrong.

The interesting question is not simply how to model more detail. It is how to recognise the structural, proportional and spatial decisions that make a building believable in the first place. Windows, floor heights, circulation, facade rhythms and construction logic can all affect whether an environment reads as designed architecture or as a collection of well-rendered rectangles.

For artists working in games, visualisation, VFX or real-time environments, that is more useful than another catalogue of modelling tricks because good architectural reasoning can influence what should be modelled before anyone starts worrying about topology.

Philipp Dohmen then takes the evening in a more data-heavy direction with “Agentic Data Systematisation for Massive Built Infrastructure Projects”. Large infrastructure projects tend to produce an impressive quantity of information before anybody produces a convincing image. Models, drawings, documents, specifications and revisions accumulate across different systems, and at some point somebody has to establish which piece of information is actually current. For 3D teams, this is highly relevant upstream of visualisation. A beautifully rendered asset is still wrong if it was built from the wrong revision.

So the second evening moves from understanding how buildings are put together to understanding how the information describing those buildings can be kept usable. One is architectural logic. The other is data plumbing. Both become painfully visible when absent.

Materials become programmable

The final evening turns to materials and convincing immersive environments, beginning with Dr. Jacob Thorn and “MaterialX Automation Using ShadingLanguageX”. This is the most obviously pipeline-oriented presentation in the programme. MaterialX already provides a standardised framework for describing material and look-development networks across applications and renderers. ShadingLanguageX approaches that ecosystem from the programming side by letting developers describe MaterialX shader structures in a higher-level language and compile them into MaterialX documents.

For pipeline developers, that changes the conversation from manually constructing every material graph to asking which parts can be generated, parameterised and maintained as code. That does not make renderer differences magically disappear, nor does it turn MaterialX into one universal shader button. What it does suggest is a more systematic way of building and maintaining material definitions, particularly where studios have repeated structures, procedural requirements or large libraries that would otherwise involve considerable node-graph archaeology. And if there is one thing every mature material library eventually acquires, it is archaeology.

Does it actually feel like Tokyo?

Sachiko Stenroos and Jaakko Saari of Sonagraf then close the main talks with “Yoyogi Train Station: Japanese Empathy & Authenticity in 3D Art”. It is a useful subject to place immediately after material automation because technically correct materials are only one part of making a digital place convincing.

The Yoyogi Train Station project therefore introduces a cultural and observational dimension into an otherwise highly technical evening. The challenge is not simply to make a Japanese train station. It is to make this place feel specific enough that “Japanese train station” does not become a procedural preset. That should make the talk relevant not only to real-time artists, but to anyone building culturally specific environments for games, VFX, virtual production or immersive experiences.

See you online

Each evening also includes a panel discussion and community chat, giving the individual talks some room to collide with the wider production questions behind them. Registration is free, and ICE.ART presentations will be recorded for registered participants who cannot attend live. The programme is, of course, subject to change.

See you there!

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