At SIGGRAPH 2026 in Los Angeles, Story Engine will showcase a new approach to virtual production built for the realities of modern filmmaking: tighter budgets, faster schedules, and the growing demand for cinematic-quality visuals.
Story Engine is a vertically integrated virtual production studio co-founded by producer Ingo Lou and VFX specialist Neil Ghaznavi. Their focus is bringing high-end virtual production workflows within reach of low and mid-budget productions. The core mission is straightforward: dramatically reduce the costs associated with locations, crew, and post-production without sacrificing the look.
At the heart of the workflow is the ability to scan real-world environments as Gaussian splat models and bring them into a live compositing pipeline on an active production stage. Live footage is composited against those environments in real time, giving directors, cinematographers, and actors an immediate, high-quality preview of the final image while cameras are still rolling. The result is a compressed path from shoot day to deliverable, with far less guesswork carried into post.
Presenting the workflow at the CenterGrid booth will be Unreal World Building TD Daniel Langhjelm, who has been with the Story Engine team since the project’s early roots in the sci-fi series Synthesis, a concept trailer that served as the original proving ground for the ideas now formalized in the pipeline.
A central focus of the presentation will be Story Engine’s collaboration with Eric Pinkel and CenterGrid, whose Virtual Studio platform provides cloud-based GPU infrastructure that allows teams to process large-scale Gaussian splat datasets across distributed machines simultaneously. Processing that once required days of local compute can now be completed in a fraction of the time. Story Engine’s pipeline depends on this kind of infrastructure to make location scanning practical at production speed, and the CenterGrid booth is where attendees can see both sides of that equation in action.
At SIGGRAPH 2026, Story Engine and CenterGrid invite attendees to see what virtual production looks like when it is designed around the working conditions of independent film and television rather than nine-figure studio budgets.
