Chaos Arena vs Disguise Designer

Chaos Arena is a Windows solution for real-time ray tracing and in-camera visual effects on virtual production stages. It moves 3D content to LED walls without preprocessing and supports carrying assets from pre-production through post-production. Arena renders global illumination, reflections, refractions, and shadows with real-time path tracing, plus single-pass rendering. Artists can adjust lights, exposure, assets, and materials during production through its interface and Material Editor. Assets from Maya, Houdini, 3ds Max, and Blender can be used. Camera tracking protocols include FreeD, Vicon, stYpe, OptiTrack, and EZtrack, with tracking data saveable as Alembic. Stage features include distributed rendering, dual-GPU rendering, and Genlock through NVIDIA Quadro Sync. Arena supports ACEScg, HDR, OpenColorIO, USD, MaterialX, real-time depth of field, lens encoders, regional decal color correction, and ray-traced Gaussian Splats. Chaos says one GPU can render a quarter of a trillion polygons at 60 fps. The product is described as out of beta and production-ready. Pricing is available by contacting Chaos for a quote or demo.

Disguise Designer creates a digital replica of a production environment for planning, visualising, sequencing, and controlling content. It supports pitch creation, camera fly-throughs, content validation, technical setup testing, and experience design. Its real-time 3D visualiser can represent productions in different codecs, resolutions, and colour spaces. Content mapping covers shaped LED screens, projectors, UV mapping, dynamic blends, and large projection canvases. Playback supports formats including NotchLC, ProRes, HAP, uncompressed codecs, image sequences, and local or remote HTML5 content. RenderStream integrates with Unreal Engine, Notch, Unity, TouchDesigner, and Volinga NeRFs. Multi-Edit enables simultaneous project editing, while Multi-Transport can run multiple timelines in response to external cues. Control options include DMX, SMPTE timecode, MIDI, OSC, FreeD, and named tracking systems. A free Starter plan supports learning, training, testing, and project development without connecting to Disguise servers; Pro costs $159/month. The user guide specifies 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 and DirectX 11.