More than half of the shots in The Mandalorian were produced using Unreal Engine

Industrial Light & Magic recently shared how it shot the special effects for the first season of The Mandalorian, a TV series that used Unreal Engine for its special effects scenes.

Unreal Engine is Epic Studio's commercial game graphics engine. In 2019, Unreal Engine released a video showing how this real-time rendering technology can change the art of filming. Obviously, "The Mandalorian" uses this technology.

The crew of "The Mandalorian" built a 75-foot diameter, 20-foot high, 270-degree circular LED TV wall, plus an LED ceiling, combining physical shooting props with digital backgrounds to create detailed backgrounds and lighting effects, greatly simplifying the shooting and production processes and making the lighting effects more realistic. For a character who never takes off his helmet, the reflection on the helmet is actually equivalent to his entire facial "expressions."

Jon Favreau introduced that more than half of the shots in the first season of "The Mandalorian" were completed on this set. Industrial Light & Magic will implement the production of 3D scenes during the filming process. What makes all this possible is the real-time rendering technology used in the game, that is, the Unreal Engine and Nvidia GPU. The engine will read the relative position of the camera and the LED TV wall, display the correct content based on the distance relationship, and project interactive lighting effects that match the real situation on the actors. This method is more realistic than the traditional green screen, which is equivalent to completely simulating the actual lighting effect through hardware. It can be said to be the "ray tracing" technology in movie special effects production.

I believe this technology will be more widely used in future movies and TV series.