The PUBG Global Invitational 2018 held at Mercedes-Benz Arena featured 20 top professional ‘PUBG’ (PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) teams from around the world. Amsterdam-based show creator Live Legends was challenged to craft a tournament open that would capture the excitement of the event and its $2 million pool of prizes.
The show’s set design had a circular theme with the squads positioned on two concentric levels. Each squad sat behind an LED screen showing their team logo or their webcams. Above the stage a four-sided LED screen showed live feeds from the game, so everyone in the audience could follow the event. For the opening show, a curtain cylinder was lowered around the stage with projection on the cylinder, the floors of the two side stages and scenic elements such as crates, real-life paratroopers, violinists, pyro effects and a lighting show reenacted the game.
With projection being at the centre of the show, Live Legends used disguise’s new Lux and OmniCal features extensively in this show.
The new Lux visualiser includes ambient occlusion, directional light, camera exposure simulation, glow, shadows, and physically correct units. Lux was put to use to calculate projector efficiency for the show’s complex visual palette, based on the data returned from Lux the team decided to use 48 Panasonic 30,000 lumen projectors - 32 for the cylinder in two equal rows and eight for each stage.
“Normally you would calibrate the projectors with disguise’s QuickCal, which is a really quick system compared to manual calibration. Still, you could easily spend half an hour per projector to make it look really good. With 48 projectors that meant a minimum of 24 man-hours, but that amount of time was not available at the venue. We had just one night to get things done - which is why we chose to use OmniCal on this project,” Dave Van Roon, Senior Mediaserver/Video Specialist explains.
OmniCal is a camera-based projector calibration engine that has been designed to dramatically improve projection quality and setup time. It uses cameras to film patterns projected from the projectors, and based on the parallax differences captured by the cameras it can determine the projector positions. In addition to providing rapid projector calibration, it’s detected blobs also eliminated the need for warping when creating the 3D model of the curtain stretched between two trusses.
Dave himself went to the disguise office in London for OmniCal training so he could become familiar with the system. “It is easy - plug and play,” he reports. “Point cameras, run capture, calibrate, align, done. It is quite heavy on the system, so it is important to think about your setup, use the right equipment and infrastructure.”
“But once it was up and running and the last alignment point was set, it was BAM! In place, done, looking good. It just snapped into place."
Live Legends client, Rosa adds “It was such incredible event. Everyone is talking about the stage and how amazing it was. We really appreciate your (Live Legends) work!"