Green Rain Studios Motion Capture supervisor and Virtual Production specialist Parth Shah has been heavily invested in the domain of motion capture and virtual production ever since he helped set up Centroid Motion Capture’s Indian arm where he supervised the studios’ performance capture, virtual production, and previs services.
Having gained expertise in a range of filmmaking technologies ranging from Performance Capture to In-Camera VFX (LED and Realtime Compositing on Green Screen) to Photogrammetry to VR Scouting to real-time AR to Visualization (Pitchvis, Previs, Stuntvis, Techvis, and Postvis) to Volumetric Capture, Simulcam, and Projection, Shah has a firm grip over Film VFX, games and television, and has a laundry list of credits to his name.
After quitting Centroid India, he had taken a break to unwind and figure out what lies ahead. He was recently appointed at Green Rain. In a candid chat, he touched upon various aspects of virtual production and projects that he is involved in.
Here are some excerpts :-
What led you to decide that you’d be working with Green Rain?
It was the team that led me to decide Green Rain. They have the most solid team when it comes to real-time technology and one of the best in this business. I have known Karan Parikh (co-founder of Green Rain) for more than a year now and we were also together during LED-based In-Camera VFX along with Cineom, Liminal, and Famous Studios. When it comes to building up custom Virtual Production solutions based on the project needs, Green Rain stands at the par and I find myself fortunate to be part of this team. There are also some very promising projects lined up at Green Rain for me to work as Motion Capture Supervisor and Virtual Production Specialist.
Tell us about the offerings and services of Green Rain.
Green rain is a Real-Time Technology studio. Their mission is to use Epic’s Unreal Engine and Real-Time workflows to educate and empower India’s creative artists, technologists, and programmers across media & entertainment, enterprise applications, and immersive experiences. Green Rain’s offerings are Virtual Production, Visualization services, Realtime Animation workflows, creation of immersive experiences and training of Unreal Engine. Green Rain has over 40 years of cumulative Unreal engine experience that spans across programming in C++ to rendering final pixels.
You’ve been experimenting with Unreal Engine lately. Tell us about the latest features like MetaHuman etc.
The best thing I found in MetaHuman was the amount of Blendshapes and joints involved. Getting 669 Blendshapes and 713 Facial Joints out of the box in no time is game-changing for the Facial Rig Industry as developing by traditional method would have taken a lot of time. Also, its compatibility and ease of setup with Facial Capture hardware are very helpful.
How do you see the rise of virtual production in India?
It is going up and up. Virtual Production in the early stage, that is Visualization (Previs, Stuntvis, and Techvis) are something very helpful and much needed for the planning of the complex scenes. With Unreal Engine and other tools that Green Rain is developing, Virtual Production is becoming more beneficial to the stakeholders. In-Camera VFX via LED or Realtime Compositing is something that might/might not be used for all the scenes as those are very shot-specific. To understand its requirement, it is very important to do Techvis of how-to Virtual Production during Principal Photography.
You were on a break lately. How did you spend your vacation?
I did take a small break to Goa and enjoyed the peace but to be honest, I did work during my break too as there were a few projects that I was on board already, so I didn’t get much time to relax. But it’s good to join Green Rain for the amazing projects in Virtual Production.