Building the Metaverse to match the real world.

I made this CGI image about a year ago when the Metaverse was the shiny new tech thing.  Most people probably won’t get what it’s about so I’ll explain it, even though David Lynch would probably scold me for doing that.

The grey and chrome sphere are tools that special effects artists use to match 3D computer graphics to real world photography.  If you are shooting a film for example, and part of the scene will be CGI, you shoot a few extra feet of the environment with someone holding a grey and chrome sphere.  The chrome sphere reflects the entire environment and that reflected image can be “unwrapped” and placed as a dome over the CGI so the same light and colors shine on the computer generated elements as in the real scene.  (The chrome ball is actually an old fashioned “poor man’s” way of doing this.  There are 360 degree cameras now that can actually just take a picture of the entire environment right on the set.)

The grey sphere shows the quality of light shining on a specific place in the shot.

This image is about building a computer generated Metaverse that people can walk around in, just like real life.  It’s the dream of constructing a Metaverse as well as the Metaverse as a dreamscape… the birth of a new alternate world.

OK, enough of that…

The main difficulty I had in creating this image stems from the fact that the reflection in the chrome ball is actually the real reflection of the CGI environment.  It’s not a composite.  The mountains actually go all the way around the environment.  The grid floor goes out in all directions.  The “planet” and the “sun” seen in the ball are on the HRDI dome over the scene that is creating the ambient light.  The dome had to be lined up so the “planet” reflected in the sphere correctly.  The mountains had to be rotated in such a way that the peaks behind her and the ones in the chrome ball both looked good.  The main light in the scene is the keylight on the character which can be seen in the chrome sphere as a bright rectangle in the upper left of the sphere.  I could have removed that in post but I left it in because that’s the point.

The metaverse was supposed to be the future of everything.  Facebook even changed their name to Meta.  Now AI is the new thing.  Will the metaverse be created?  Will AI create the metaverse for us?  Who knows…

Created in DAZ Studio 4.20
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Capture One