Virtual scouting for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Virtual scouting and virtual production pipeline engineering for a Marvel feature
Client: Happy Mushroom (now Narwhal Studios), for Marvel Studios
Production: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
Credited: Richard England, art department
Project Duration: January 2021 – August 2021
In a sentence
Richard England of Reflex Arc provided pipeline engineering for the film's virtual art department at Happy Mushroom: custom Unreal Engine plugins, Perforce version control, and the international multi-user VR scouting sessions that let the key creatives scout the quantum realm sets during COVID lockdowns.
Images courtesy of Narwhal Studios. They show the process, but are not from this production.
What is virtual scouting?
Virtual scouting, often called VR scouting, lets filmmakers walk around a digital version of a set or location before it is built or shot, usually wearing a VR headset. The director, director of photography and production designer can look at the space from any angle, try out camera positions and agree how a scene will play, while artists adjust the set around them. On Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the director and key creatives met in virtual sets to review the script, position cameras and refine scene details directly in Unreal Engine.
Questions people ask
How is virtual scouting different from a location scout?
A physical scout needs everyone in the same place, and the place has to exist. A virtual scout can happen while the set is still being designed, with people joining from different countries, and changes can be made during the session. That mattered on Quantumania, which was prepared during the pandemic with key creatives spread from Hawaii to London and several US locations. Narwhal Studios ran more than 45 virtual location scouts with key decision makers, and more than 200 virtual stage walks with the production designer.
Who took part in the virtual scouts on Quantumania?
The film's key creatives. Director Peyton Reed and his team met in the virtual sets for location scouts. Production designer Will Htay walked the sets more than 200 times as they were designed. Director of photography Bill Pope used more than 25 sessions for pre-lighting and blocking out camera moves. Narwhal Studios’ case study also names visual effects supervisor Jesse James Chisholm, art directors Safari Sosebee and Carlos Fueyo (who now runs his own virtual production studio, Playard Studios), and writer Jeff Loveness among those involved. Many were new to VR, so the sessions had to be simple and reliable for people who weren't technical.
What equipment does VR scouting use?
Less than you might expect. For Quantumania, each person's virtual scout kit was a PC, a mouse, a VR headset and, at times, an iPad used as a virtual camera. The sets themselves were built and run in Unreal Engine, with version control (Perforce) keeping every location on the same version of each set.
What is a virtual art department?
The virtual art department (VAD) is the part of the art department that designs and builds sets digitally. It starts once there is a refined script, working closely with the production designer, and spends most of its time in Unreal Engine on lighting, camera placement, set dressing, VR scouting and lookbook renders. Its digital sets are what the filmmakers scout, and they carry on into the shoot. On Quantumania, 15 VAD artists built 8 hero sets, with more than 30 set variants and more than 30 lighting scenarios.
Who did the virtual production for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania?
Several companies. The virtual art department and virtual scouting were run by Happy Mushroom, now Narwhal Studios, with Felix Jorge as virtual production supervisor. Industrial Light & Magic provided its StageCraft LED volume, and principal photography began at Pinewood Studios in July 2021. Richard England of Reflex Arc was part of the virtual art department crew, providing pipeline engineering: custom Unreal Engine plugins, version control, and the multi-user VR scouting sessions.
Is it the same approach as The Mandalorian?
Closely related. Happy Mushroom worked on The Mandalorian with Epic Games and Industrial Light & Magic, preparing real-time environments that were shown on LED walls behind the actors, and supporting VR scouts in which directors and key creatives explored the environments while artists adjusted them. Quantumania’s director, Peyton Reed, had directed episodes of The Mandalorian, and ILM brought the same StageCraft technology to the film.
The challenge
The production needed a robust VR scouting pipeline that would:
- Enable international collaboration across Hawaii, LA and London time zones
- Handle complex quantum realm environments optimised for VR performance
- Support multiple simultaneous users scouting sets in real time
- Capture session data (camera placements, notes, lighting changes) for direct handoff to ILM
- Work reliably for directors and key creatives, many new to VR
- Maintain version control across rapidly evolving virtual sets
Running shared VR sessions across those distances meant dealing with latency: keeping everyone synchronised and the sessions responsive took careful infrastructure planning.
What we did
Pipeline engineering for the virtual art department: the technical infrastructure behind VR scouting at scale.
- Custom Unreal Engine plugin development – new tools and features for virtual production workflows
- Pipeline and version control – the asset pipeline and Perforce version control, working closely with technical artists so sets were optimised and VR-ready
- International multi-user sessions – running the servers and infrastructure for VR scouts across three time zones
- Session management and data capture – capturing camera positions, notes, scene changes and lighting adjustments, and packaging them so ILM could access them directly
- VR scene optimisation – keeping scenes and sets running smoothly in VR
- UX and accessibility improvements – making the VR virtual production tools easier to use
- VR tool inductions – training directors and key creatives, including director of photography Bill Pope
During scouts, the job was running the live session: sorting out any headset or software problems as they came up, keeping things moving, and making sure every note, camera and change was saved for the next stage. In short, letting the artists and filmmakers get on with their jobs, with the technology as invisible as possible.
Not for the first time (see also Jurassic World VR Expedition, the project that led Happy Mushroom to bring Richard in), this meant working closely with a large team across several time zones.
From VR scout to StageCraft volume
Once a set was scouted, we captured a snapshot of the session, with all its notes, scene changes, lighting adjustments and placed cameras, and published it into Perforce for ILM to pick up directly. ILM then took over the downstream work: refining, optimising and re-authoring what was needed to make the environments ready for the StageCraft LED volume. Some of the Narwhal artists had come to the project straight from the Star Wars series.
Watching the creative team in full flow in those sessions felt like a glimpse of the future.
The result
The film was released in 2023, after principal photography in 2021 and a long post-production through 2022. Seeing the final shots come out so close to what was planned in the scouting sessions is a testament to the work of the whole virtual art department.
Full cast and crew on IMDb.
Narwhal's case study video shows the sets as planned and how they turned out in the final shots:
Narwhal Studios case study
Behind the scenes with director Peyton Reed (IGN)
What came next
This work was followed by further ambitious virtual production projects for major US productions, later cancelled and remaining under NDA. As is common in this space, not all work reaches the public domain.
Broader context
This work sits alongside other real-time and GPU-accelerated projects we’ve delivered – from custom iPad painting tools with ultra-high-resolution export (including David Hockney’s tooling since 2018), to NVIDIA AI SDK integrations for non-headset mixed-reality spectator cameras at live events, and WebRTC video streaming from embedded Jetson devices. The common thread is production-grade engineering for demanding real-time systems.
Working on virtual production, or a real-time pipeline that has to just work on the day? Get in touch.
