At SIGGRAPH 2026 in Los Angeles, Story Engine will showcase a new approach to virtual production designed for the realities of modern filmmaking—faster schedules, tighter budgets, and growing demand for cinematic-quality visuals.
Founded by producer Ingo Lou and virtual visual effects specialist Neil, Story Engine focuses on bringing high-end virtual production workflows to low and medium-scale productions. Their mission is simple: reduce the massive costs tied to locations, lighting, large crews, and lengthy post-production pipelines while still delivering photoreal results.
Presenting the workflow at SIGGRAPH will be Unreal World Building TD Daniel Langhjelm, who will demonstrate how Story Engine combines live-action filmmaking, Gaussian splats, and real-time compositing inside Unreal Engine to create near-final shots directly on set.
The workflow feeds live camera footage into Unreal, where actors and environments are composited in real time and streamed to the DIT cart for immediate review. Directors, cinematographers, actors, and colorists can instantly evaluate framing, lighting, and environmental integration while cameras are still rolling—dramatically reducing production guesswork.
A major focus of the presentation will be Story Engine’s transition to Gaussian splat environments. Using rapid capture methods ranging from drones to iPhone scans and X-Grid Portal Cam systems, the team is building photoreal digital environments capable of replacing costly physical locations and reducing post-production work.
The presentation will also explore Story Engine’s collaboration with Eric Pinkel and CenterGrid, leveraging cloud-based GPU infrastructure through Virtual Studio to process massive Gaussian splat datasets across multiple machines simultaneously. What once required days of local processing can now potentially be reduced to a single production day.
Originally refined during the sci-fi project Synthesis, Story Engine’s pipeline represents a growing shift toward cloud-native, real-time filmmaking workflows where production and post-production increasingly happen at the same moment.
At SIGGRAPH 2026, attendees will get a firsthand look at how Gaussian splats, Unreal Engine, and distributed cloud compute are reshaping the future of virtual production.
