Blender used in Hybrid Studio pipeline

Daniel Paul shares a fascinating look into Hl-studios, where Blender is used in a 'hybrid', real-time visualisation solution.

Hl-studios is an industrial communications agency located in Erlangen and Berlin, Germany. In our Hybrid Studio, we merge the real and digital worlds together. The models can interact in real time with their digital environment. As a result, we shorten studio production time and benefit from maximum flexibility on set. What’s more, our customers can assess and make real-time changes on set. Numerous correction rounds are reduced, expensive sets are no longer necessary.

Our recording devices, whether camera or photo, are read by a sophisticated system and then tracked in real time. Thus, creating a virtual camera within the 3D program, one that mirrors the exact rotation and position of the real camera. Factors, such as lens shift, focus distance, focal length, sensor size, lens distortion, and many others, are brought directly over to the virtual camera. That’s how we create a digital clone. A clone that makes it possible to merge the real and virtual worlds.

We use Blender as an interface, as viewport and Cycles are an optimal combination for optical representation. The viewport has proven its performance, even in large scenes with more than 15 million polygons. Thus, it is perfect for a real-time viewing. Thanks to Cycles and 4x1080 Ti, it’s possible for us, within a few seconds, to match the lighting conditions of our scene with that of our studio’s lighting. Due to these abilities, Blender has proven itself to be robust and reliable. The extremely practical Autosave function writes, within seconds, 2 GB of data on the SSD.

With this technology we are able to produce images up to 100 MP, nonetheless averaging only a rendering time slightly above 4 hours on 4 GPUs for one image.

We are looking forward to working further with Blender and above all with Eevee. In our first tests, we were able to achieve very good results with visualisation. Here, at first glance, you cannot tell the difference between Cycles and Eevee.