The method
ALIVE
Actual Light In Virtual Environments
Virtual production usually means an LED wall pretending to be a place. ALIVE inverts it: the place exists — as a miniature — and its real light is carried through every step to the actor's face. As far as I can tell, nobody else does this.
Build the set
A physical miniature set is built by hand — hull plating, surface details, weathering. Real materials, real geometry, real imperfection. This is what cameras love and CGI fakes.
Light it — in states
The set carries its own LED lighting, individually addressable. It gets captured in multiple discrete lighting states: key only, fill only, practicals only, engine glow only. Each state is one layer of a light palette.
Scan with motion control
The 8-axis motion-control rig flies repeatable paths around the set and photographs it from every angle — once per lighting state. Same path, every pass, exact to the step.
Reconstruct as splats
The captures become photorealistic 3D scenes through Gaussian splatting. Not a CG model that imitates the miniature — a volumetric photograph of it. One splat per lighting state.
Composite — with synchronised light
Actors are shot on greenscreen. The decisive move: the stage lights are physically synchronised with the LED states baked into the splat. The light hitting the actor is the same light that lit the model. Foreground and background match because they were never separate.
Why it matters
The hardest problem in compositing is matching light. ALIVE doesn't match it — it reuses it.
See it in development: KORETH