BBC Salford: Realtime AR

The goal is establish a diverse range of AR products to enhance the various shows based at BBC Salford. Its important that these products fit the current gallery ecosystem and are executable by the director without as little intervention as possible.

Working in Blender I projected the image onto simple geometry and tested objects and lighting in the space, a large void between the ground and first floor. Lighting combines a panoramic shot of the artium serving as a HDRI / cubemap, plus handful of area lights focused on the asset and presenter. With further attention paid to lighting the stairs and 1st floor boarder. This helps to direct the views eye in such a busy enviroment.

The stairs required a attention before becoming useful. To competently add transparancy to the glass the presenter was roto scoped onto a seperate mesh and brought forward relative to the camera. Darkening the ground floor at the shader level helped the asset punch through the space, another step towards communicating whats important in the shot. You can see the true light value on the bottom right of the rendred picture.

Intergrating this with a real time workflow required sending remote camera data directly to the compositor (Viz) which is interpolated within a virtual scene in as a inverted matrix transfom. This allows repeatable camera positions and movments using the Shotoku remote camera system which adds sophistication to the story telling capabilites of this product. This also helps to extended animation sequences as the camera can effectivly hide seams and cuts.

Returning to the studios, my NFL asset was loaded to the compositor. I had baked a bump and displacment texture into the FBX to test how far PBR materials can be pushed in this workflow. Finding out that PBR’s are not supported with the current version installed (Viz3), meaning no emissions either. which resulted in the semi-glassy material seen in the live shot at the top of this page.