Featured Speaker: Daniel Langhjelm
Presenting the workflow at the CenterGrid booth is Daniel Langhjelm, Unreal Engine World Building TD, CGPro instructor, and cinematic environment specialist.
Daniel’s work is closely tied to StoryEngine, where he has been actively involved since its early development stages. StoryEngine is a vertically integrated virtual production pipeline focused on live on-set capture, Gaussian splat environments, and real-time compositing, designed to bring high-end virtual production workflows into more accessible film and television pipelines. Daniel’s involvement traces back to the early sci-fi concept project Synthesis, which served as a foundational testbed for many of the real-time ideas now driving the system forward.
Session Link:https://cgvirtualstudio.com/siggraph-2026/sessions/storyengine-capture-composite-done-live-on-set-vfx
Building on this foundation, Daniel continues to explore how captured real-world environments can be transformed directly into Unreal Engine scenes, enabling faster, more iterative approaches to worldbuilding and cinematography.
Daniel is an Unreal Engine Environment and Lighting Artist specializing in cinematic worldbuilding, virtual production, and real-time storytelling. Based in Vancouver, he works at the intersection of environment art, lighting, and virtual cinematography—building worlds designed not only to be explored, but to be filmed.
He currently serves as an instructor with CG Pro, where he teaches Unreal Engine workflows focused on environment creation, lighting, composition, and cinematic production techniques for film, games, and virtual production pipelines.
His professional background spans a wide range of realtime and production environments, including work with Epic Games, where he contributed as a Technical Artist on worldbuilding and animation fellowship initiatives. He has also worked across virtual production and lighting roles at studios such as BRON Studios and Arc VFX, helping develop Unreal Engine pipelines for film, LED volume production, and real-time previs workflows.
Daniel’s work focuses on building visually compelling and technically robust environments using tools such as Unreal Engine, Houdini, SpeedTree, and real-time rendering pipelines. He is especially interested in how procedural workflows, cinematic lighting, and virtual production techniques can be combined to accelerate storytelling and enable new forms of realtime filmmaking.
In this session, Daniel will demonstrate how environments are captured, processed, and brought into Unreal Engine using Gaussian splatting workflows—bridging scan data, cloud compute, and real-time compositing into a unified production approach for modern virtual production pipelines.
At SIGGRAPH 2026, Daniel brings this experience into a cutting-edge live demonstration of scan-to-Unreal workflows and cloud-powered production, showing how real-world
