In 2024 Seeper undertook some work for Dewar’s Whisky visitor’s centre. This included an area where a presentation was given by a virtual tour-guide, meaning that one side of the room had to house a wall projection carefully balance to appear to be a part of the physical room.

While the majority of the work was produced externally, I was asked to create the projected background space.

Obviously this had to fit the scale and POV of the visitors, so the first task was to establish camera focal distances and positions for the green screen team to film the actor. Physical cameras were set-up in 3DS Max to give a number of options, and ensure accuracy in the final work.

As a bit of an experiment, it was decided the final animation would be created in Unreal. As a further experiment I wanted to know if NVidia’s emerging AI tools could be used to capture sufficient data from the Green Screen shoot to apply to a 3D avatar in order to cast convincing shadows from the matted actor back into the digital space.

It worked okay, if not entirely accurately. So while it certainly cast shadows (and, in another pass, reflections)….

…it was felt it didn’t line up just quite enough with the original footage to warrant use. At least not without a lot of additional editing. Which was disappointing, of course.

The room also had to undergo several transformations, including lighting and a mecahnical process to bring down a screen to show a projected film (within, of course, a projected film). The tranparent liquid and glassware proved taxing fro Unreal’s path-tracing, and I ended up matting in composite with a mix of deferred rendering (which worked fantastically for GI on opaque surfaces), and path-tracing for any moving glassware, requiring very long render times.

Here’s an edited version of the final result.

Sadly, I no longer have access to the finished work, but you can see it for yourself at https://www.dewars.com/gl/en/aberfeldydistillery/. Probably