Three captured light states
Key, practicals and engine glow were photographed in separate passes with exposure, white balance and focus locked.
ALIVE
A physical object becomes a navigable world without surrendering the material and light that made it believable.
Not a look. A chain of evidence.
ALIVE — Actual Light In Virtual Environments — tests whether the physical truth of a miniature can survive reconstruction, camera movement and a live-action composite. The chain is only as convincing as its weakest hand‑off.
What exists. What does not — yet.
First splat alignment
From one test viewpoint, the reconstructions stayed close enough to switch between states. Dark-pass noise and floaters remain.
Live actor / moving camera
A greenscreen performance must follow the calibrated digital path and hold up through lens match, occlusion, light and final comp.
One physical source. Five hand‑offs.
Matter
Build the sourceStone, cloth, resin, metal and miniature sets begin as real objects. Surface response and imperfection are photographed, not invented after the fact.
Light
Record the statesThe object is lit as a miniature stage. Separate practical lighting states preserve the decisions made in front of the camera.
Capture
Repeat the pathAn eight-axis motion-control system is built to repeat camera movement and coverage precisely across multiple passes.
Reconstruct
Keep what the lens sawGaussian splatting turns the photographs into a navigable record of the real object — material, light and all — ready to be scaled and assembled into a world.
Perform
Put the camera back inThe next proof places a motion-controlled greenscreen performance inside the captured world, then finishes the shot in Nuke with matched lens, timing, grain and light.
Same move. Different realities.
The motion-control path becomes the common coordinate system between workshop, Blender and greenscreen stage.
Miniature. Camera move. Performance. Final frame.
Put a human inside the proof.
- Lock coordinate scale and lens distortion.
- Record a repeatable greenscreen move.
- Match depth, occlusion and contact shadow.
- Finish motion blur, grain, colour and sound.