"Dinosaur Prophecy"

"Dinosaur Prophecy " - Second Fulldome Show for the NASA Immersive Earth Project

So how do you make a show on the effects of climate change interesting and dramatic... you add dinosaurs! Home Run Pictures created almost eight minutes of fulldome dinosaurs for the second of three planetarium shows funded as part of the NASA Immersive Earth Project. The goal was to create animation beyond what had been done on the subject in the technically difficult planetarium fulldome format.

Each of four scenes in the show discussed the effect changes in climate had on the dinosaurs of a particular era. Location imagery captured with a special fisheye lens camera at dig sites where fossils of the specific animals were found set up each animation. From a New Mexico site where a climate change enhanced flash flood is thought have buried dozens of Coelophysis, to a volcanic erruption in China that buried and preserved feathered dinosaurs, to the infamous KT asteroid strike event that covered the Earth with a blanket of dust and possibly wiped out the the last of the dinosaur's world forever.... animation sequences created brought the animals to life in immersive realism that can only be experienced in fulldome.

New CGI techniques had to be developed to allow creation of the dinosaur sequences in the 360x180 degree fulldome format. Standard IK tools allowed the animals to be rigged and animated, but the fulldome format created all sorts of challenges for the special effects portions. Scenes became massively large because everything is always in view, front, left, right and behind in fulldome... scenes lasting almost two minutes without cuts demanded a one take approach that typically is avoided in CGI work because of the complexity it creates.

The project was produced in a one year schedule with six animators working on various aspects of the animations. Modeling of the dinosaurs to current scientific liking, rigging for life-like animation, skin color and texture creation, feather and fur dynamics, particle, smoke and water effects for flooding streams, erupting volcanos, and asteroid strikes all were created simutaneously during the process, all coming together at the end of the schedule.

Fast creative-decision interaction during the animation, texturing and effects dynamics process was available using Macintosh G5 4-processor workstations equiped with high-end graphics cards. Rendering was accomplished on a Macintosh Xserve render farm with 80Gb of RAM and 3.5 Tb of storage. Maya software was employed as the main toolset.

Click here for Quicktime movie #1
Click here for Quicktime movie #2
Click here for Quicktime movie #3

The NASA Immersive Earth Project is a five year funded program to create educational immersive planetarium shows that deal with Earth Science... Rice University's Space Institute and the Houston Museum of Natural Science are the key coordinators