Real-time
Visuals that happen live.
Live-camera IMAG FX and generative worlds, built in Notch and rendered in the room at show speed. For Sphere Las Vegas, world tours, festivals and residencies.
Real-time
Live-camera IMAG FX and generative worlds, built in Notch and rendered in the room at show speed. For Sphere Las Vegas, world tours, festivals and residencies.
The case for real-time
Anything that can be rendered in advance can now be generated in advance. Real-time is a different product: not a file, but a system that makes the picture in the room, from what is happening on stage.
It responds to the camera, the performer, the lighting desk, the timecode and the crowd. It has to run at 16K on a venue’s hardware without dropping a frame, hold up night after night, and take a note from the artist in the afternoon with the change live by doors. That is live performance craft, with a toolchain of Notch, disguise, camera and lighting that takes years to learn and can only be finished at the desk in rehearsals.
Comix has been building that craft since the Avicii and Tiësto years, and in 2025 and 2026 put it on the biggest canvas there is.
It reacts to the performer, the camera and the crowd. A file cannot.
When the artist changes the set at soundcheck, the show changes with it. No overnight render, no compromise.
Operators ride it. Residencies and tours stay alive across a run.
16K at Sphere, 10K at Soundstorm, stadium LED at San Siro, from the same craft.
Lighting, camera and video in one system, which is where show design is heading.
The skill is in the system and the people at the desk, which is the part no prompt replaces.
What real-time means at Comix
Camera feeds treated as material rather than a window: distorted, delayed, mapped onto geometry, dissolved into particles and lit to match the content around them, so the performer is inside the world rather than cut into it.
Environments built as 3D scenes and rendered live in Notch, so camera moves, timing, colour and density can be changed in the venue instead of re-rendered overnight.
Every look ships with controls the operator rides during the show: blur, trail length, particle density, intensity. It can be pushed when the moment allows and pulled back when a performer is moving too much for it.
Built on disguise, with 4K camera inputs and timecode, and with lighting fixtures controllable from inside the Notch scene so video and lighting react to each other rather than running in parallel.
Because the show is Notch end to end, the previs is the show. What is approved on a monitor is what plays on the canvas.
Case study
Nine shows on the 16K canvas, March and April 2026. Comix provided visual direction across the show’s arc, the walk-in experience, the real-time IMAG effects inside the main show, and a fully real-time system for the opening sets.
“Combined with stunning visuals across the venue’s massive wraparound screen, the opener nearly stole the night.”EDM.com, reviewing opening night. The opening-set visuals were the real-time system.
The main show
The looks were built so that the live camera felt native to the world around it rather than inset over it. Three 4K camera inputs came from disguise and were split and treated in Notch, timed to the show’s timecode, with the operator riding the exposed parameters live. The team tested at Sphere in January, ran previs on site through February and refined up to opening.
Timecoded IMAG reveals cut into the world, the camera window scaled to the moment, the feeds re-choreographed through the song’s rotating vortex.
Ethereal trails and delays on the performer, gold dust falling from the frame to match the feathers, with an exposed blur control so the effect can be pulled back when he is jumping.
A gold recolour of the look family, particles stripping away in the wind, built around an eagle and multiple cover feeds.
Camera feed projected through moving 3D geometry, matched to the content’s camera path.
Feeds mapped onto shattering glass, flying out across the canvas and seemingly through the audience.
Live feeds flanking an electrified tree growing out of the feather clouds: the show “grew a literal electrified tree out of feather clouds and live band projections” (Live for Live Music).
The opening sets
Rather than render content for the opening sets, we built a system that generates the show live. Five worlds were designed and modelled as 3D environments by the Comix team, brought into Notch and rendered in real time on the Sphere canvas, with transitions designed to match the motion of the world they were leaving.
Each world has a wireframe twin so the look can shift between solid and line-drawn. IMAG is integrated with softened, ethereal frames. Lighting fixtures are controllable from inside the Notch scene, so the lighting designer and the Notch operator could jam together, and a previs rig on site meant the system kept developing outside the main room.
The build pushed the software. The team worked directly with Notch’s developers on new nodes and on moving textures from disguise into Notch at Sphere scale, and shipped on Notch 1.0. The same system then served different guest artists on different nights: one build, many shows.
Dunes generated procedurally in Notch, two monumental faces in profile, a procedural tree grown from a modelled base.
A ritual interior with a patterned roof and plinth.
A vast hall with windows cut for light and a place for the artist’s mark.
A room of doors and hanging lamps, light beams masked by geometry inside the scene.
A textured gateway into space.
Comix team: Emil Bardh and Armin, Notch design and build; Josh Gallagher, creative direction; Sofia Wang, project management and environments; Sam Hodgkiss and Aryan Ratra, 3D environments and wireframes; Harry Bird, visual direction and producer. Programmed and operated on site by Brett Bolton. Main-show rendered content by Woodblock.
The wider body of work
Show content and a Notch IMAG treatment designed for the architecture itself: the ring around the booth, the curved wall, the mirrored ceiling disc.
Stadium tour, 2026All video content and Notch FX for the sell-out Italian stadium run, including two nights at San Siro.
Sphere, 2025Around ninety per cent of the visuals built in Notch, including the near-5,000-screen Noise sequence.
World tour, 2019A Notch look prototyped per song and ridden live, with the camera feed treated as material.
Festival, 2021 to 2024Millions of real-time particles for the Big Beast stage, previewed on a live model of the rig.
HeritageShow direction and ten years of live-camera FX, where the Comix signature was formed long before Sphere.
Sphere, a residency, a tour or a festival stage. Tell us the room and the dates and we will tell you what real-time can do in it.
Tell us about the show