Chaos Arena vs Lightcraft Jetset

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.

Lightcraft Jetset is an iOS application for combining computer graphics and live-action video into visual-effects shots. It displays and captures the combination in real time, using phone-camera and ARKit tracking to map a scene and align live-action footage with a 3D scene. The app supports real-time rendering of production-level USDZ models and records camera-original footage, live composites, and tracking metadata. Compositing tools include AI mattes, a green-screen keyer, and 3D screen planes. Printed floor or vertical origin markers can reset tracking. Lightcraft describes post-production workflows connecting Jetset with Unreal, Blender, and USD through Autoshot, and provides a Blender add-on plus a character-conversion tool. Scene scanning is available only in Jetset Pro and Jetset Cine, requiring a LiDAR-equipped iPhone Pro or iPad Pro. The App Store listing requires iOS 18.0 or later and an A12 Bionic chip or later.