# @radiancefields on YouTube

- **Type:** Video
- **Original URL:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=lqyoA-tj7Pg
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/70209238-radiancefields-youtube
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/3e94575cf3.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-09-01T15:00:06.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Michael Rubloff (@RadianceFields) — https://gondola.cc/RadianceFields

## Caption

Sinners was shot on IMAX 65mm film — and needed Michael B. Jordan to play twins, Smoke and Stack, in the same frame. A traditional face swap couldn't survive that resolution, so Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) built a new approach: the "Halo rig," a shoulder-worn array of ~12 cameras around Jordan's head, feeding a GaussianAvatar pipeline that used radiance fields (Gaussian splatting and NeRFs) to generate the synthetic training data their face-replacement models needed.

I sat down with RSP's Oscar-nominated VFX Supervisor Guido Wolter and Machine Learning Lead Dr. John Bastian to go deep on how it actually worked — from wrangling 52 TB and 125,000 faces, to editing expressions with FLAME parameters, to why they never put a splat directly on the final plate. We also get into where Gaussian splatting is heading in VFX: environments, relighting, crowds, set survey, VR, and native support landing in Nuke and Houdini.

RSP contributed roughly 100 of the film's most technically difficult shots. Sinners went on to earn a record haul of Academy Award nominations, including Best Visual Effects.

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 First contact: NeRFs, splats & the Radiance Fields blog
1:15 Why IMAX film forced it: the Halo rig is born
2:58 Finding radiancefields.com & looping in the ML team
4:03 What made radiance fields viable for Sinners
5:12 The real unlock: focal length & editable expressions (Portrait4D)
8:12 Speccing the Halo rig for IMAX: film vs. digital sharpness
11:04 Genlock, custom firmware & syncing 12 cameras
12:58 Performance capture today: self-supervised splats
15:34 52 TB & 125,000 faces: wrangling Smoke vs. Stack
18:40 Vampires, gold teeth & multi-model management
21:08 Inside the GaussianAvatar pipeline
25:44 Betting on a 3-year-old technology
28:14 Cheaper or faster? Keeping it 100% Michael B. Jordan
30:30 The relighting problem
33:10 The hardest problem: controllability & the black box
37:30 Splats for environments: the obvious win
39:52 Monarch, Nuke 17 & splats going native in VFX
42:36 LiDAR, resources & why VFX isn't "ML in the wild"
44:24 The bottleneck: splat generation is still off-pipeline
48:32 The future: replacing set survey, LiDAR & reference photography
51:33 VR, browser viewers & Dune: Prophecy
52:58 Crowds, set extensions & what's next
54:36 Closing thoughts: capturing real life

🔗 Mentioned in this episode
Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) → https://www.rsp.com.au/
Sinners (2025) → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinners_(2025_film)
Portrait4D-v2 (4D head synthesizer) → https://yudeng.github.io/Portrait4D-v2/
3D Gaussian Splatting (Kerbl et al., original paper) → https://repo-sam.inria.fr/fungraph/3d-gaussian-splatting/
Nerfstudio → https://docs.nerf.studio/
Foundry Nuke (native splats in Nuke 17) → https://www.foundry.com/products/nuke-family/nuke
SideFX Houdini → https://www.sidefx.com/
Volucap (Hydra rig used on Mickey 17) → https://volucap.com/
MetalSplatter (splat viewer for Apple Vision Pro) → https://github.com/scier/MetalSplatter
Mickey 17 → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_17
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch:_Legacy_of_Monsters
Dune: Prophecy → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune:_Prophecy

📚 More from Radiance Fields
Website → https://radiancefields.com
Newsletter → https://radiancefields.substack.com/
[X/Twitter → ADD LINK]
[LinkedIn → ADD LINK]

👥 Guests
Guido Wolter — VFX Supervisor, Rising Sun Pictures [LinkedIn → ADD LINK]
Dr. John Bastian — Machine Learning Lead, Rising Sun Pictures [LinkedIn → ADD LINK]

If you found this useful, subscribe for more deep dives on radiance fields, Gaussian splatting, and the people pushing them into production.

#Sinners #VFX #GaussianSplatting #MichaelBJordan #RadianceFields #NeRF #RisingSunPictures #IMAX #VisualEffects #3DGS

## Stats

- **Views:** 1,076
- **Likes:** 19
- **Shares:** 0
- **Comments:** 0

## Tags

visualeffects, imax, michaelbjordan, nerf, vfx, gaussiansplatting, risingsunpictures, radiancefields, 3dgs, sinners

---
Copyright (c) Gondola