Promotional

Many companies want to make promotional or informational videos such as the video that runs before an aircraft takes off. Traditionally this can be approached in two ways – a live action video (actors) or an animated video (CGI). Both are expensive and require extensive involvement of 3rd parties.

Ursaleo’s high resolution digital twins open a third way. With ray traced graphics, photorealism and real time natural lighting, digital twins can be used to create a video with at least the fidelity of Computer-generated imagery (CGI), with no special software or high end computing required.

Gemini our digital twins platform renders in the cloud on NVIDIA‘s highest end server firms, the Graphics Delivery Network (GDN). These farms are located around the world, in total more than 50,000 of the latest GPUs are available at any one time. The farms also have very low latency so using them twins feels as if they are running on your local machine. The performance achieved with this approach runs to 200 frames per second (FPS) or higher. Gemini twins are streamed to any device that can support a browser.

The process of making a promotional / informational video is to record the twin on the local machine. Don’t forget, even though you are seeing exceptional quality ray traced graphics, there’s no performance hit. Effectively the process is the same as watching a Netflix movie – whatever graphics or effects are used makes no difference as the rendering is all being done in the cloud.

Gemini allows for the setting up of as many custom waypoints in the 3D scene as the user likes, so the camera can ‘jump’ from point to point or move under the users control for ‘flying’ and ‘orbiting effects’. Pan and zoom are available.

Moving objects can be included – these can move on pre-determined tracks or under AI control when they will react to their surroundings such as objects placed in the path. The camera can be pre-programmed to follow objects at a distance or more complex manovers can be used such as the camera ‘overtaking’ the moving object.

There are many visual effects that can be applied to the scene. This is gaming technology fundamentally and all the visual effects seen in games are available on the twin. Realistic fires, smoke, explosions, gas flows, water flows, particles like sand moving can all be used.

There is also a rich set of simulation tools to allow the setting up of complex behaviors such as objects falling under gravity or colliding with each other. More complex simulations such as robots working on a production line or automated pallets moving under the computers control can be added to the twin.

Real time lighting is another feature of the Gemini platform allowing for the time of day to be set and produce realistic lighting, shadows and reflections. the time can also be set to night and lights in the twin turned on and off producing realistic shadows and reflections in a nocturnal setting.

A mark up tool is provided so the twin can be drawn on to highlight specific areas with a range of shapes, arrows or freehand annotations. Text can also be added to the screen to note points of interest or add informational content.

There is no real size limit to the Gemini twins, the only thing typically affected is the load times. A geospatial tool is also provided to allow loading of real world geography that the twin can be placed in. This is highly accurate in urban environments dropping off a little in more rural settings, but still accurate to a few centimeters.

Various weather effects are available such as sunny skies, overcast and so on.

Once the base video is captured it can be used with standard video editing software to add voiceover, music, or to be combined with video from other sources such as a green screen shot.

The results are visually stunning, inexpensive to create, require no specialized hardware and can be done by competent operators in a few hours.