Tron: Ares — Real-Time Point Cloud Prototype
A real-time point cloud visualization system prototyped for Industrial Light & Magic, exploring how Unreal Engine 5 could drive in-film holographic UI for Tron: Ares.
Context
I was brought on by Jayse Hansen to prototype a real-time system for Industrial Light & Magic, supporting Tron: Ares, which released in theaters on October 10, 2025.
The goal was a dynamic point cloud visualization for in-film UI and hologram sequences. My task was to explore how Unreal Engine 5 could drive hundreds of iso spheres in real time, sampling and displaying environmental data in a stylized way, ultimately for visualizing camera arrays tracking an entity through the city.
My Work
- Built an actor-based spawning system that generates hundreds of iso spheres in a spherical pattern using line traces.
- Fed a Scene Capture Cube render target into a custom material so each iso sphere inherits color data from the traced surface, mapped with automated UVs. I got stuck on this early on and reached out to my friend Christian Sparks, a Technical Artist at Heart Machine, who helped me get the first working iteration of the material.
- Built a separate Geometry Nodes setup in Blender for the light cycle itself. The actor-based spawning system was tuned for building-scale subjects, so the bike needed its own denser, more detailed version scaled for something character-sized, with randomized iso sphere scaling within a range.
- Set the iso material to scale instances down as they neared the camera, so nothing obstructed the shot.
Conclusion
The system didn’t end up in the final film. ILM went with a simpler 2D version instead. Still, the result was a fully dynamic visualization pipeline that turns real-world data into living holograms in real time, and a good example of bringing procedural Unreal workflows into a cinematic production pipeline.