DUE

Dimension Unreal Engine

To deliver the highest-quality virtual production visuals, our innovation team Dimension Futures has developed DUE, our own custom version of Unreal Engine that’s fine-tuned for delivering virtual production for film and TV.

We’ve optimised our real-time production workflows and with DUE, a custom build of Unreal Engine which we’re using to deliver complete realism and an unparalleled visual quality for filmmakers wanting to shoot using LED volumes.

The goal in developing DUE - or Dimension Unreal Engine - was to create even better visuals in virtual production and fill gaps in the real-time production process that are specific to virtual production and on-set operations for the film and TV industry. DUE extends the engine, adding features specific to virtual production for film and TV which deliver the best possible visual fidelity and real-time in-camera performance.

Principally it’s based on the idea that hardware raytracing should be active and accelerated for every step of the real-time rendering production process when using Unreal Engine. This enables our content and lighting teams to create more realistic and more plausible lighting effects and conditions in our content that’s used in LED volumes production.

To create something that’s indistinguishable from real life, we need to accurately simulate the transportation of light. The better we can do this, the more realistic our images are, and the closer to real life the visuals become.

Jaspreet Dhanjan

Senior Software Engineer

We extended the engine to better support our productions and content creators. This involves fine-tuning the technology to address specific gaps in the rendering pipeline and the enhancements help us push the visual fidelity of our work even further.

Markus Hoell

Principal Real-Time Rendering Engineer

On top of the better lighting simulations unlocked by DUE, it also provides a frame generation feature supporting nDisplay which effectively doubles our performance budget on set when shooting content with an LED volume. And the addition of Lumen AOVs enables the decomposition of Unreal’s lighting system into four distinct lighting AOVs (Direct Diffuse, Direct Specular, Indirect Diffuse, Indirect RoughSpecular), allowing for precise, per-frame lighting adjustments during post-production.

We also have a custom GPGPU Compute pipeline for scalable, high performance real-time Gaussian Splatting rendering. Alongside our compute pipeline, we added additional features to Gaussian Splatting, such as raymarched shadows and animations.

Our custom Unreal Engine build also includes advanced Ray Tracing and Denoising optimizations, along with critical in-house enhancements to core rendering modules. These empower us to deliver cutting-edge visuals and bring our creative vision to life without compromise.

We’ve created DUE because of feedback from creatives and filmmakers on their needs for virtual production. Fine-tuning the engine this way means we can push what’s possible in virtual production - and you can already see the difference on screen.

Junaid Baig

Chief Innovation Officer

DUE has been deployed to Dimension’s virtual production and content teams, and the results of its industry-leading output can be seen in major projects including Those About To Die, and Here as well as several other upcoming films and series.

See more of what we can do

Virtual Production