Clear Angle Studios launches Volumetric Rig to accelerate photoreal VFX datasets

The shift from mesh-based geometry to Gaussian splats marks a significant move toward data-driven production that reduces rendering overhead. By capturing natural lighting and motion directly into a 4D dataset, Clear Angle addresses the high costs and labor requirements of manual mesh cleanup and texturing. For the streaming ecosystem, this technology enables higher-fidelity crowd scenes and digital doubles for cinematic original content without the typical VFX timeline extension. Watch for the first major film credits utilizing this relightable splat pipeline, which the company indicates is already facilitating work with major studios like Disney and Netflix.

The launch of the VCR follows several technical milestones in the standardization of Gaussian splatting for media and entertainment. Per The Future 3D, February 2026, the Khronos Group introduced the KHR_gaussian_splatting extension for glTF 2.0, a move backed by Nvidia and Apple that allows these assets to be rendered in standard game engines like Unreal. This interoperability is critical for virtual production, where high-frame-rate rendering is required to maintain the illusion of digital backgrounds on LED volumes.

Simultaneously, the competitive landscape for volumetric services is expanding beyond high-end film stages. Per BroadcastNow, December 2024, Clear Angle recently established a permanent hub in Los Angeles to provide character and costume scanning for Disney and Netflix productions. This centralization reflects a broader industry trend toward "digital character insurance," where actors are scanned early in production to provide assets for unexpected reshoots or dangerous stunts.

Technologically, the industry is moving from static 3D captures to dynamic 4D playback. At NAB 2026, Emergent Vision Technologies demonstrated a 36-camera array capable of rendering 105MP 4D Gaussian splats with synchronized sound. While storage remains a hurdle — as noted in Visual Intelligence research from March 2026 — the development of compressed formats like SPZ is beginning to enable the transmission of these complex volumetric datasets across cloud-based VFX pipelines.