Creating visuals for a live concert is one of those jobs where the idea might start with a sketch, a moodboard or a single image, but it pretty quickly turns into something much bigger. This is about building a living, breathing visual system that has to hit the right moment in the music, work across different venues, and hold together night after night in front of thousands of people.
For Senior Designer Lorenzo Venturini of GATE1 Studio, the challenge was helping turn Laura Pausini’s latest tour into a medieval fantasy world, with a huge castle forming the centrepiece of the stage. The team combined Blender, Notch, Disguise Designer and GX 3+ media servers to create everything from animated LED textures and camera effects to particle-driven visuals that could react to the performance in real time.
Lorenzo with a team including Lead Disguise Operator Carlo Barbero, Programmer Stefano Petroni and Media Server Operator Yoshi Lehouck, as well as Laura Pausini’s creative team, to produce a castle that the singer could perform from, night after night. In this how-to, Lorenzo walks through how the team built the castle from the ground up, starting with the creative idea and moving into 3D modelling, real-time effects, compositing and the behind-the-scenes preparation needed to make a complex concert show run smoothly.
It’s a great example of how tools like Blender and Notch are changing what’s possible in live visuals, and if you’re exploring your own 3D workflow, the best Blender tutorials are a good place to start building those foundations, while the best drawing tablets can make everything from concept sketches to texture work feel much more natural.
Lorenzo is a Senior Notch Designer and co-owner of GATE1 Studio in Milan. With a background in graphic design and a deep understanding of live event visuals, he specialises in crafting immersive experiences for brands, concerts, and interactive media. Previous projects include an immersive club experience for Pacha Ibiza, Three Rooms at AYA Universe Dubai, and live concert tours for artists such as Vasco Rossi and Annalisa.
01. Start with a theme
Many creatives working on live concert visuals will start with a theme or a concept. For this project, our main theme was medieval fantasy, and this then informed everything, including lights and visuals.
Once we had our theme, we began researching medieval imagery like castles, creatures, and medieval stories. This is where we first came up with the idea of creating a castle that the singer could perform from on tour, to fit with our medieval fantasy theme.
From there, we began working on stage designs using references from the creative director, as well as sources such as Pinterest. We spent around three weeks in pre-production, developing those references together with Laura Pausini and co-creative director Luca Tommassini, before moving into ten days of on-site testing and refinement once we reached the arena.
02. Build a strong 3D foundation
Once you have your theme and stage design concept decided, you can then begin to bring your idea to life in 3D. To do this on the Laura Pausini tour, we began by using Blender to model a 3D castle using standard poly modelling for the main towers and walls, boolean operations to cut in windows, arches and the central entrance used for the artist's entrances and exits, and a clean retopology pass so the mesh stayed light enough to animate in real time.
We then baked normal and AO maps and unwrapped the UVs with the LED surfaces in mind, so every texture and effect we later built in Notch would map cleanly onto the physical LED architecture on stage.
Once the castle was built in Blender, we then imported the model into Notch as an FBX file. From there, we were then able to use Notch to create the real-time visuals that we wanted to display on the castle walls with LEDs.
03. Craft your effects
To create the effects for the castle's LED walls, we first looked through the track list and began planning what the visuals would look like for each song. For one track about the 1970s, for instance, we decided to display pop art-style graphics on the castle.
To do this, we built saturated, high-contrast colour grades and halftone-style dot patterns directly in Notch, then used Disguise Designer's Sequencing feature to animate those Notch parameters in time with the medley, so the pop-art palette could shift and intensify as the songs changed.
For another track called Hijo de la Luna, which tells the tragic tale of a Romani woman who makes a pact with the Moon, we wanted to recreate a giant moon that would slowly grow out of particles during the song. We created these effects using Notch's new material system, as well as its particle system, and deformers to manage our castle mesh.
We leaned on Notch's GPU-powered particle engine to simulate the moon's surface from hundreds of millions of points in real time, then used Disguise Designer's Sequencing feature to animate those Notch parameters live, timing the moon's growth precisely to the track.
04. Composite your work
Once the effects were completed, we then used Notch to composite them together into our 3D castle. For live concert visuals, this phase is especially important because good compositing allows you to create impressive visuals without having to rely on heavy effects that are unmanageable to render out in real time.
To composite the visuals, we used Notch's native 2D compositing and post-processing tools to layer the real-time and pre-rendered elements together into a single show file worth around 50 Notch layers, running on Disguise's GX 3+ media servers. That included multiple live camera feeds, IMAG effects and 8K particle simulations reacting to the music, distributed across the castle's different levels, its columns and the central door used for the artist's entrances and exits.
We also relied on Notch 2026.1's stability and performance headroom to manage all of those high-resolution assets and effects simultaneously without dropping frames.
05. Preview your work ahead of the show
The final step was to preview all the effects we created in Disguise's Designer software. This let us accurately see how our castle would look in real life at the hundreds of venues on the tour by showing us a 3D digital double of each stage setup. By adding environmental elements and cameras, and switching to Notch's Hybrid Renderer, we were able to generate numerous high-quality previews well ahead of load-in. Making heavy use of Notch's exposed parameters feature for the render queue was key to keeping the project clean, modular and easy to navigate as the show evolved.
Doing this meant Yoshi Lehouck, the operator on the tour, could make sure the Notch effects always looked great, even with constantly changing conditions such as different stage layouts, missing or repositioned LED walls, and local IMAG formats in 16:9 or 4:3. The preview also meant we could review the entire show in 3D together with Laura Pausini and show director Luca Tommassini ahead of live performances, even before the LED screens were physically installed on stage.
06. Be prepared to change things at showtime
By the time the concerts began, we always had a timeline of the entire show in Designer that let us see exactly which effects would appear on the LEDs based on the time code of each song.
However, during a live concert, you can't always rely on a timeline that's set in stone. The artist might decide to sing a different song order on the day, or talk to the audience between tracks. To manage these live changes, we used Designer's Expressions feature to build dynamic behaviour into the show.
For example, we used Expressions to let our programmer, Stefano Petroni, manipulate content and the two incoming camera feeds on the fly while keeping rendering times down, rather than having to re-cue a fixed timeline for every change. Every venue on the tour brought a different stage layout, sometimes with missing or repositioned LED wall towers and local IMAG formats in either 16:9 or 4:3, so each stop needed its own live programming approach worked out with Expressions rather than a one-size-fits-all show file.
On top of that, working inside the Disguise ecosystem meant we always had Disguise's X1 as a portable backup: if a flight case was delayed anywhere on the tour, we could plug a licence key into any laptop and pick the whole castle show back up immediately, instead of renting and reprogramming a new media server on location. We then used Disguise's GX 3+ media servers to run the Notch graphics reliably every night from a laptop
