This is how The Mandalorian S2 looks so damn good: a gigantic LED wall

The Mandalorian has some incredible special effects that were driven by interesting, and familiar technologies -- first, Unreal Engine is heavily used and second they used a gigantic LED wall that replaces physical sets and gives the directors and actors an entire new world to play in. Check it out:

Industrial Light & Magic have released a new video detailing the upgrades they did to the huge StageCraft 2.0 that super-powered The Mandalorian S2. The gigantic LED-wall was massively expanded and updated with new technology for the new season of The Mandalorian, with ILM using their new Helios technology -- the company's first cinematic render engine designed for real-time visual effects.

Helios has been "engineered from the ground up with film and television production in mind, Helios offers incredible performance, high fidelity real-time ray tracing, the ability to rip through scenes of unparalleled complexity, all while leveraging ILM's unrivaled color science, and was designed from the start to work seamlessly with ILM StageCraft".

The directors can use a hand-held camera to walk around in real-time to see the environment being rendered around them in the real-world, and virutally onto their screen as they walk around. They can adjust the light, brightness, where it is... or the entire background itself. There is still a physical set in the middle, with the StageCraft 2.0 wall around the set -- it's an incredible thing to see, but I definitely would love to see it in-person.

The Mandalorian creator and Iron Man director Jon Favreau said: "By the second season, ILM developed some software that was specific to this technology and to what the hardware was capable of. It also has forced us into having a more efficient workflow that draws pre-production, post-production, production, all into one continuous pipeline".