Industry Talks & Events
SIGGRAPH 2026.
From Viewport to Virtual Production.
NVIDIA RTX Rendering Day · Real-Time Ray Tracing · OpenUSD · Chaos Vantage · Los Angeles, California · July 2026
RTX Rendering Day at SIGGRAPH 2026
At SIGGRAPH 2026 in Los Angeles, I presented “From Viewport to Virtual Production: Real-Time Ray Tracing with Chaos Vantage” as part of NVIDIA RTX Rendering Day.
The session connected production rendering, real-time ray tracing, OpenUSD, the Chaos Vantage Hydra Delegate, Gaussian splats and virtual production into one workflow story: reducing the time between an artist making a change and being able to judge the result.
SIGGRAPH was also a broader week of technical presentations, customer meetings and partner discussions for Chaos, with many conversations centered on Houdini, Solaris, OpenUSD, GPU rendering and real-time workflows.
Iteration is the bottleneck.
Final image quality matters, but the speed at which artists can validate a change has a huge influence on the creative process.
When feedback is slow, teams naturally make fewer decisions. When feedback is immediate, artists can explore more, compare more, and commit with greater confidence.
The presentation focused on bringing high-quality ray-traced feedback closer to the place where artists already work, without forcing production through a disconnected real-time pipeline.
Production rendering, OpenUSD and real-time review
Production Context
OpenUSD & production-scale scenes
How production USD assets can move through look development, lighting and review while preserving the scene structure and context artists need.
Houdini / Solaris
Chaos Vantage as a Hydra Delegate
Interactive path-traced feedback directly inside SideFX Solaris, allowing artists to review OpenUSD and MaterialX scenes without leaving the environment where the production scene is assembled.
Rendering Workflow
Real-time review & final rendering
V-Ray and Chaos Vantage working around the same production assets rather than forcing artists to rebuild content for a separate real-time environment.
Emerging Workflows
Ray-traced Gaussian splats
Gaussian splat assets participating in ray-traced workflows with reflections, refractions, occlusion, parallax and relighting.
Virtual Production
From viewport decisions to Chaos Arena
Connecting artist-side scene review with larger virtual-production workflows so the same assets and decisions can continue toward stage and on-set use.
GPU Acceleration
Production workflows on mobile RTX
Demonstrating high-end ray tracing and GPU rendering on an RTX 5090 Laptop GPU rather than relying only on a desktop workstation.
Production-style demonstrations, live on stage
The presentation was built around live, production-style demonstrations rather than a feature-by-feature product walkthrough.
One of the main scenes was Andre Cantarel's White House environment, a large scene with extensive geometry and instancing. It provided a practical example of the kind of production data that benefits from fast, interactive review.
The demos ran on an ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18 with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, demonstrating that high-end real-time ray tracing and GPU-rendering workflows can also run on a mobile workstation.
Faster rendering matters because it changes how teams make decisions
The goal of the presentation was not simply to show a faster renderer. The more important question was how faster rendering changes the way production teams work.
OpenUSD, Hydra and modern GPU rendering make it increasingly possible for final-quality rendering and interactive review to use the same scene data and remain much closer to the artist's production context.
The real value of faster rendering is faster feedback: helping artists and supervisors make more creative decisions while the work is still flexible.
A technically focused room
The RTX Rendering Day session drew a mostly full room with a technically focused audience.
The discussion after the talk concentrated heavily on Gaussian splats: how they can be rendered in Chaos Vantage, V-Ray and V-Ray GPU, and how captured environments can interact with conventional scene content.
There were also questions around virtual production, Chaos Arena, production-scale USD scenes and the relationship between real-time review and final rendering.
Recorded Presentation
Watch the full SIGGRAPH presentation.
NVIDIA recorded the session as part of RTX Rendering Day. The complete presentation is available through NVIDIA On-Demand.
A full day of Chaos presentations
SIGGRAPH was much more than one presentation. On 21 July, Chaos hosted a full day of sessions in Room 511C at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
The program connected ray-traced Gaussian splats, V-Ray, Chaos Vantage, virtual production and cloud workflows, with sessions from Chris Nichols, Vladimir Koylazov, Sean Willis of Crafty Apes, Ivan Reel of Strada XR and Eric Pinkel of CenterGrid.
Attendance remained strong throughout the day. Several sessions reached capacity, and a substantial queue formed outside Room 511C before Vladimir Koylazov's presentation.
Meetings, partners and the wider SIGGRAPH week
The rest of SIGGRAPH week included meetings and discussions with production studios, technology partners, artists and commercial teams.
Many of those conversations returned to the same themes: the growing role of Houdini and Solaris, OpenUSD-based pipelines, GPU rendering, large production scenes, real-time feedback and virtual production.
Chaos also hosted a networking reception at the AC Hotel, giving customers, partners, colleagues and people from across the computer-graphics community more time for informal discussions away from the tightly scheduled conference program.
Session & presenter pages
Official Program
Selected images from SIGGRAPH 2026
Useful links
Recording
Watch the presentation on NVIDIA On-Demand
Full recording of “From Viewport to Virtual Production: Real-Time Ray Tracing with Chaos Vantage.”
Presentation
Official SIGGRAPH presentation page
Session description, program information and technical focus.
Presenter
Official SIGGRAPH presenter profile
Presenter biography and SIGGRAPH 2026 session listing.
NVIDIA
NVIDIA RTX Rendering Day
NVIDIA's SIGGRAPH program covering production rendering, real-time graphics and GPU workflows.
Conference
SIGGRAPH 2026 conference schedule
Official event program and session search.
More talks & presentations
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