disguise has announced a major software release in early April. Cluster rendering will allow users to scale out their real-time content rendering without compromise, as their productions increase in size or complexity. disguise invited a select group of global partners to pressure test and implement the technology into their workflows in preparation for public release.

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disguise’s cluster rendering will unlock the limitations of a virtual production studio or immersive installation by scaling out real-time content up to an unlimited capacity, says the company. This is achieved by spanning real-time content over more than one disguise server as each machine will render a fragment of the final content frame to increase the render power. Developed to support Unreal Engine’s nDisplay capabilities, the technology also removes the need to manually configure the nDisplay cluster by allowing it to be automatically set up through the disguise interface.

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Early access to cluster rendering has allowed global partners participating to test and implement cluster rendering into their workflows to achieve real-time content rendering of the highest quality, detail and frame rate at scale. By testing the feature in real-world scenarios the beta partners enabled disguise to gather and integrate feedback into the feature development roadmap.

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“Innovation lies at the core of everything we do at disguise and we always work together with our partners to ensure that all new developments help improve their work. Our beta testing programs offer our partners the opportunity to influence the development of new workflows, working directly with our developers and product specialists,” explains disguise Product Manager, Joe Bleasdale. “A collaborative relationship is essential to ensure we can continue to develop world leading solutions that scale extremely well in the real world.”

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The first phase of the cluster rendering Insider programme ran in November and December of 2020 and included partners; All of it Now with XR Stage (US), Ark Ventures (Japan), Boum Creative (US), Hibino (Japan), LMG (US), Orca Studios (Spain), StudioLab (US), White Light (UK) and 4M (Thailand). They were joined in phase two, which ran from January to March 2021, by AVK (Portugal), Fluge (Spain), Framestore (US), MOFAC (Korea), PRG (Belgium), Promosa (Canada), S1T2 (Australia) and Stealth7 (Russia).

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Following initial feedback from the beta group, the team at Boum Creative predict that the cluster rendering feature “is going to be a virtual production game changer. Adding cluster rendering functionality and the ability to scale processing to an already impressive xR workflow is exactly what we’ve been looking for”.