The audience is an inseparable part of creating a vivid and dynamic virtual live event scene. Especially in Japanese pop cultures, it is common for audiences to bring colorful penlights to cheer on the performer.

However, due to reasons like performance limitations and cost of implementation, most scenes with penlights are created without high-fidelity audience models, and/or real, physical-based lighting that matches the impact like real life.

In this project, I make use of several new/experimental features offered by Unreal Engine 5, in order to achieve highly detailed and dynamic visuals, while also keeping good performance at large audience scale.

Specifically, PCG system is used to generate the venue and audiences based on splines, AnimToTexture plugin is used to create Vertex Animation Texture that enables low-cost animation for audiences, and MegaLights is used to make having hundreds of fully movable and dynamic lightings in the scene possible.