Teleporting Stages
An Unreal Engine tool that teleports your physical MoCap stage to any saved virtual location in real time
What it is
An Unreal Engine tool that teleports your physical motion-capture stage to any saved virtual location in real time. A MoCap stage is the marker-tracked room where performers move to drive digital characters; this tool stores up to sixteen virtual locations out of the box, switchable by hotkey mid-take, with every attached actor, prop, and virtual camera moving to its saved offset for that location.
Designed and shipped as Realtime Supervisor at Versatile Media (2025). It turns scene transitions on a virtual production stage from a multi-minute manual rebuild — re-positioning the stage origin and every attached actor by hand — into a single keystroke during the shoot.
In short: virtual location switching at the speed of a StreamDeck button.
The problem
On a physical MoCap stage, the studio floor is fixed but the virtual scene the cameras are showing isn’t. A single shoot day might need the stage to “be” a city street in one shot, a forest clearing in the next, and a rooftop after that. Each scene wants the actors, props, virtual cameras, and lighting placed differently relative to the stage origin.
Without an automated way to switch, every scene change means stopping production. Someone manually re-positions the stage origin in the editor, then re-positions every attached actor and prop one by one, then verifies nothing got knocked out of sync. By the third scene change, the day is gone.
Teleporting Stages collapses that whole sequence into one button press. The tool remembers where the stage origin should sit for each saved location, plus where every attached actor sits relative to the stage at that location. One click in the editor, or one StreamDeck hotkey during a take, and everything snaps into place.
What it does
The tool exposes a small Editor Utility Widget that the user docks anywhere in the Unreal editor. From there:
- Spawn a new teleporting point. Drop the stage origin actor anywhere in the world, click “Spawn New TP”, and that location is saved as a numbered teleporting point. Up to sixteen by default.
- Save attached-actor offsets. Any actor attached to the stage origin (props, characters, virtual cameras) gets its position captured per teleporting point. The same actor can sit in different positions per scene.
- Apply offsets. At any teleporting point, snap all the attached actors to their saved positions for that point.
- Three visibility modes. Toggle between hiding and showing teleporting markers in the editor and during play. The operator sees what they need; the camera sees only the scene.
- Hotkey support during play. Every teleport and offset-apply action is bindable. Pair with a StreamDeck and the entire blocking sequence becomes hardware buttons on the operator’s desk.
Technical implementation
The core is an Unreal Editor Utility Widget (EUW_TeleportingStages) that provides the in-editor UI panel, plus a BP_StageOrigin actor that sits in the scene as the anchor everything else attaches to. Saved teleporting points and per-point actor offsets persist on the BP_StageOrigin’s details panel, so the data lives with the asset and travels with the project (or the level) without external configuration files to manage.
Editor mode and play mode share the same teleport logic, so the operator can preview a scene exactly as it’ll behave during a take. The three visibility modes use editor-only conditionals so the markers are visible to the operator but hidden to the camera during play-in-editor.
The whole tool ships as a self-contained Unreal plugin, mapped via Perforce into the destination project’s plugins folder. No engine modifications, no per-project setup beyond enabling the plugin.
In production
Teleporting Stages is now a routine part of how virtual production shoots run at Versatile Media. Scene transitions that previously required stopping production are now hardware-button switches the operator triggers without breaking the actor’s flow.
The hotkey workflow is the part that’s changed shoots most. With a StreamDeck mapped to teleporting points, the operator can run through a full sequence (point 1 → alley, point 2 → rooftop, point 3 → interior) without ever touching the editor. The director keeps blocking. The