For those who don’t know the event: ICE.ART 3D Environment Conference 2026.I is a free online environment conference hosted by VRBN and delivered via GoTo Webinar. No lock in, no big fuss, just a very specific kind of nerd joy.

ICE.ART 3D Environment Conference 2026.I kicks off April 7, 2026, running 5:00 PM to 8:30 PM CEST as a live webinar on GoTo Webinar. Day I runs under the Physics Simulations banner, with an intro, two talks with Q and A, prizes, a panel discussion, and an open community chat. Registration is free of charge on the event site, so the only real cost is admitting you enjoy hearing other people talk about creativity, technology and physics. Bring a headset and a mildly disciplined browser tab situation.

Goran Pavles brings blockbuster sim scars to Ice.Art

Goran Pavles is a Visual Effects Supervisor at Stormborn VFX. He leads a team at Stormborn Studios, an Emmy and VES Award winning visual effects company based in Vancouver. He has over 15 years of experience in VFX and specializes in complex FX driven sequences for film and television, including 2012, Man of Steel, and 300: Rise of an Empire, plus series work on Yu Yu Hakusho, 5 Days at Memorial, and The Penguin. On the agenda, he is slated to present Artdirecting Physics Simulations for Hollywood Blockbusters, with Q and A.

André Thomas lives at the intersection of games and real sets

Prof. Dr André Thomas is Co-Head of the Immersive Realities Research Lab at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. He founded Triseum in 2014, where he serves as CEO and leads the creation of award winning academic video games. He has more than 30 years in CGI production and has worked on video games, live action feature films, and commercials, including being Head of Graphics for EA SPORTS Football titles and contributing graphics for films including Men in Black, Con Air, Independence Day, Valiant, Ant Bully, and Tomorrow Never Dies. On the schedule image, he appears on Day II with Planning Physical Studios: Managing Business and Creativity.

Tobias Hauck bridges film instincts and GIS scale

Tobias Hauck is a Software Development Lead at the Esri Stuttgart Research and Development Center. His work focuses on Reality Mapping, turning imagery and laser scans into accurate large scale 3D meshes and Gaussian splats for GIS and digital twin workflows. He is with Esri since 2016, previously worked in feature film visual effects, and brings a passion for rendering, computer animation, and 3D environment creation. On the agenda , he is listed on Day II with Geospatial Gaussian Splats: Creating 3D Maps of Large Envrionments, with Q and A.

Come hang out, learn something, maybe win something

The agenda includes prizes and a panel discussion. By the way, the webinar puts attendees in listen-only mode (You are muted automatically). The invite is simple: register, block the evenings, and bring at least one question you have been saving for a day when someone else has to answer it.

Homepage: https://www.ice.art/
Registration: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/96699203094794328

P.S: Afterwards, some or all of the talks will go online in full length on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/@ice_conference

The post Today: ICE.ART 2026.I kicks off on April 7 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Three evenings, three tracks, one calendar

The three track themes are set as Physics Simulations for Day I, Physical Sets and Stages for Day II, and Gaussian Splatting for Day III. Registration is free of charge, with sign-up routed through a GoTo Webinar registration page.

Each day is structured around an intro block, multiple presentation slots, a panel discussion, and a wrap-up. The agenda also includes a prize lottery segment and a communal chat slot to hang out after the formal outro. Some presentation slots are still to be determined, so full session titles and speaker names are not complete currently.

The topics

Day I carries the Physics Simulations theme. One listed session title for this day is “Artdirecting Physics Simulations for Hollywood Blockbusters,” with Goran Pavles from Stormborn Studios.

If your work lives in fx heavy shots, large-scale destruction, or the fine art of making a solver behave on a deadline, this day looks designed to scratch that itch while staying in the orbit of environment craft.

Day II is themed Physical Sets and Stages. Even without the speaker list, the track theme is clear: this is the part of the conference aimed at the reality-capture-to-digital handoff, the on-set-to-post handshake, and the practical constraints that keep virtual worlds grounded in physical ones.

Day III is themed Gaussian Splatting. One session is Geospatial Gaussian Splats: Reality Mapping in ArcGIS, with the speaker Tobias Hauck from an Esri R&D Centre in Stuttgart.

How to attend?

The event is delivered as a webinar series with three scheduled sessions. The attendee email for the event includes a unique join link or a webinar ID for joining. Audio can be taken through computer audio or by telephone as an alternative option (Follow the Event there if you want to make it an apparently enormous phone call, to give you some space from your coworkers, family, whatever. We are not judging).

Attend via Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/events/ice-art3denvironmentconference27437804320210702336

Register via GoTo Webinar: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/96699203094794328

Join the Discord!

Pricing and availability

Registration is free of charge on the conference website. No paid ticket tiers, upgrades, or pricing options beyond that free registration statement. You will join via GoTo Webinar, and registration is open now. The event is positioned as the conference for anything related to creating 3D environments, plus there are prizes to win (including free Digital Production Subscriptions), which is the most elegant way to justify watching another talk when your to-do list starts to stare back. Save the dates, tell your favorite env nerd, and warm up your question asking fingers.

Register: https://www.ice.art/
Questions: conference@ice.art

The post Save the date: ICE.ART 2026.I is in two weeks first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The CEUM 2025 recordings are now available to stream. The CityEngine User Meeting, hosted by the ICE.ART 3D Environment Conference, delivers a compact tour through current procedural-city workflows, ArcGIS-driven planning pipelines, and emerging production use cases in urban-scale visualization.

The lineup includes case studies such as “ArcGIS as a Planning System,” a deep dive into “Parisian shapes,” and a demonstration of how procedural modeling supports real-world planning tasks in projects like downtown Wake Forest.

A key technical highlight is the updated Python 3 support in CityEngine, presented with a focus on integration scenarios for automation, data pipelines, and asset generation. Esri’s Professional Services team also breaks down utilization trends and typical deployment patterns seen across planning offices and visualization studios.

All talks, intro to outro, are now online on the CEUM website and the official YouTube playlist.

The organizers also confirmed the next CityEngine User Meeting for 2 April 2026, giving everyone enough time to procedurally generate travel plans.

The post CEUM 2025 Recordings Online: Cities, Pipelines & Python first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Tomorrow (Thursday), the CityEngine User Meeting 2025 goes live at 5 p.m. Central European Time (8 a.m. Pacific / 11 a.m. Eastern). It’s a free online event for professionals and enthusiasts working with CityEngine and related tools. The session is hosted by the same organiser behind the IceArt events, known for bringing together a precise mix of artists, designers, and developers. Attendance is free but registration is required via GoToWebinar.

Devin Lavigne, Partner, Houseal Lavigne, X: @devlavigne
A Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners (FAICP), Lavigne is cofounder of Houseal Lavigne, known for its GIS-driven 3D planning projects. He integrates ArcGIS, CityEngine, SketchUp, Unreal Engine, and Omniverse to visualise urban data. He has led more than 200 plans worldwide and received the APA National Excellence Award, Esri’s Most Innovative Partner Award, and five Esri SAG Awards. Lavigne regularly presents at Esri UC and the Geodesign Summit, focusing on pragmatic, production-ready digital-twin workflows.

Dr. Leilei Duan, 3D Technical Consultant, Esri
Duan holds a PhD in Design, Construction, and Planning from the University of Florida and previously taught at the Spatial Sciences Institute at USC. At Esri, she advises clients on advanced 3D spatial solutions and emerging applications for CityEngine and ArcGIS Urban.

Romain Janil, Founder & CEO, romainjanil.com X: @RomainJanil
Janil is a designer specialising in 3D environment production across realtime, offline, and hybrid workflows — including simulation, games, and VFX. Known for procedural innovation and strong visual sensibility, he bridges the design and technical domains, making procedural design accessible to production artists.

Silvia Casas, Senior Product Manager, Esri
Casas manages ArcGIS Urban and CityEngine product development. With degrees in urban planning and architecture, she joined Esri in 2004 and has since led multiple 3D city and planning initiatives. She coordinates user requirements and development priorities for both ArcGIS Urban and CityEngine, translating feedback into stable production features. Expect insights from her on current roadmap directions and the practical challenges of balancing R&D and user stability.

Simon Haegler, Principal Software Developer, Esri
Haegler is a core developer at Esri R&D Zurich and one of the technical architects behind CityEngine. Trained in electrical engineering, he specialises in procedural 3D city modelling for media and AEC workflows. His work bridges the tool’s procedural engine with modern rendering and pipeline integration.
Haegler often presents detailed looks at CGA rule systems and interoperability between CityEngine and realtime tools.

For City Planners, TDs, and VFX Generalists Alike

CityEngine sits at the intersection of visual effects, realtime visualisation, and urban simulation. Whether used in city planning, game environments, or film previsualisation, its rule-based modelling workflow continues to attract a technically minded audience. The organisers describe the event as “fun”, a welcome rarity for a tool better known for geometry than parties. Expect a few seasoned users to show tips, scripts, and workflows not usually found in documentation.

Why It Matters

For production artists already relying on procedural assets, this event is a chance to catch up directly with the tool’s developers and early adopters. With contributors from both academia and production, it bridges the gap between R&D and daily use.

The post Procedural Thursday: CityEngine Users Meet Online Tomorrow first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Khronos Group, in collaboration with OGC, Niantic Spatial, Cesium (Bentley), and Esri, has formally added 3D Gaussian Splats (3DGS) to the glTF ecosystem. Two experimental extensions, KHR_gaussian_splatting and KHR_gaussian_splatting_compression_spz, lay the foundation for interoperable splat workflows across DCCs, render engines, geospatial platforms, and the web.

This development places Gaussian Splats, until now a fast-moving research and tool-integration phenomenon, onto the same structural footing as meshes, point clouds, and textures. In other words: splats just got standardized.

From Research Trick to File Format

Gaussian splatting isn’t new. The math dates back to the 1990s, but the 2023 Inria paper “3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering” gave the technique a second life. By rendering 3D scenes as clouds of anisotropic Gaussian ellipsoids, each storing radiance and opacity, researchers achieved real-time neural rendering that rivaled neural radiance fields (NeRFs) without the training overhead.

What makes splats compelling is their efficiency: no polygons, no voxel grids, no heavy neural nets. Just point-based primitives that can capture detail in thin structures, soft translucency, or reflective materials.

Within a year, Houdini gained a native GSOPs plugin, V-Ray added splat rendering in Chaos Vantage, and studios began experimenting with splats in volumetric video pipelines such as HOLOSYS+. Now, the Khronos Group has moved to lock this fast-growing format into glTF, which already brands itself as the “JPEG of 3D.”

KHR_gaussian_splatting

The first of the new extensions, KHR_gaussian_splatting, defines how splats are represented inside glTF assets. Each splat is treated as a point primitive with the following attributes: Position (XYZ), Rotation (quaternion), Scale (anisotropic ellipsoid dimensions), Opacity and Spherical Harmonics coefficients for both diffuse and specular lighting

The extension allows fallback to sparse point clouds if a consuming renderer doesn’t support splats—ensuring that files remain viewable, even without specialized splat engines. For shader developers, the inclusion of spherical harmonics (SH) is key. SH enables compact representation of lighting across a hemisphere, which allows splats not only to look correct but also to respond naturally to lighting in real-time environments. Up to 3rd-degree SH coefficients are supported.

KHR_gaussian_splatting_compression_spz

The second extension, KHR_gaussian_splatting_compression_spz, tackles the elephant in the room: storage size. Traditional PLY splat datasets are enormous, with billions of points often required to reconstruct complex scenes. To address this, Niantic Spatial contributed the SPZ compression format, MIT-licensed for free use. SPZ achieves up to 90% smaller file sizes compared to equivalent PLY datasets while maintaining visual fidelity.

SPZ blobs can be embedded directly into glTF buffers. At runtime, they can either be streamed as compressed chunks or decompressed into raw primitives. This dual mode makes SPZ especially suited for geospatial and AR contexts where bandwidth is limited.

SPZ v2.0: Better Rotations

Version 2.0.0 of SPZ adds improved encoding of splat orientations. Rotations are stored as quaternions, but instead of four floats, SPZ encodes only the three smallest components as 10-bit signed integers. The missing largest component is reconstructed at runtime, with a 2-bit index flagging which component was omitted.

This compact scheme increases precision for long, thin geometry—think power lines, fences, antennas—and improves rendering stability in massive geospatial datasets. It’s the difference between “the wire looks straight” and “the wire jitters like a bad motion-capture solve.”

Why This Matters

1. Standardization
   Until now, Gaussian Splatting workflows were fragmented: PLY exports here, custom Houdini nodes there, and bespoke converters everywhere. With glTF extensions, splats can flow through established pipelines with predictable interoperability.
2. Production Viability
   Splats are great in research demos, but production requires stability. glTF’s adoption across web, AR, and DCC ecosystems ensures that Gaussian Splats won’t remain academic curiosities.
3. Performance & Compression
   SPZ addresses the practical bottleneck: dataset size. Geospatial datasets and volumetric captures can hit terabytes in raw splats; with SPZ, they become streamable assets.
4. Lighting Flexibility
   By embedding spherical harmonics, splats can sit naturally in lighting pipelines—whether inside Houdini’s Karma XPU, V-Ray, or CesiumJS streaming environments.

glTF as the “JPEG of 3D”

glTF’s trajectory has always been about unification and accessibility. From PBR textures to Draco compression, glTF brought complex 3D assets into a web- and engine-friendly format. Adding Gaussian Splats continues that trend, ensuring that cutting-edge formats don’t remain vendor-locked.

Roadmap and Next Steps

The current extensions are experimental—Khronos invites developers to test, validate, and propose refinements. Early validation across diverse geospatial datasets confirmed SPZ’s effectiveness, but the long-term plan is to extend the extensions with more attributes, compression modes, and streaming optimizations.

The post 3D Gaussian Splats Officially Added to glTF Standard first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.