Insights from RENDR 2026

Last week I attended Rendr Festival in Belfast. The assignment from Lux Aeterna: check out what our peers, partners and potential partners have been up to - and so much of what I saw really cemented my view that VFX and CGI are some of the most innovative and technically savvy fields in the entire creative industries.

As someone who goes to quite a few tech conferences and, like everyone else, is bombarded with AI hype on LinkedIn, it was so refreshing to hear about innovations from a wider range of technologies. Is it telling that the most insightful and inspiring deep dives came from people working with tech other than AI?

Like Tobias Wiesner's breakdown of the phenomenal crowd simulation VFX Weta created for The Last of Us: Season 2. Tobias was really open about the challenges the team faced, sharing some of the snags they encountered along the way, but the resulting solutions were mind-blowing.

As a big Fallout fan I was enthralled by VFX Supervisor Jay Worth’s breakdown on the work his team did on the show. Something I had a sense of from watching the show, but was confirmed listening to Jay, is that there’s real appreciation and respect for the source material at the core of Fallout’s production - from direction and writing through to set design and VFX.

Unreal Engine was used for previz, virtual production, and environment work on our sci-fi short film, RENO, so it was cool to hear all the mentions of its use across the different talks. Ben Kidd from Epic Games gave a great intro into how to use Unreal for performance capture, something I’m eager to give a go.

I’m sure we’ll be attending next year, and perhaps we’ll be also showcasing next time around too. Watch this space!