Future Scenario for Impact Earth

"Future Impact Scenario " for the NASA Immersive Earth fulldome show "Impact Earth"

As the final sequence to the Immersive Earth show, Impact Earth, Home Run Pictures was called on to create a possible future impact of a 2-km comet on the Earth's surface. After expert science advisors gave input as to what what be expected, an impact site of the Gulf of Mexico, just south of the Houston area was selected as our target. The impact would be witnessed by a group of astronauts on the Lunar surface, in keeping with the "witness" theme of the planetarium show.

The audience viepoint would constantly switch between the Lunar site and close-up views of the distruction as well as dramatic space views of the comet's head on its way to impact. The scenario chose a comet impact since scientists are fairly confident that they have all the potential asteroids that could impact our planet under observation already... but new comets are continually being discovered and one could surprise us.

The most challenging part for the animation production was the scenes showing the potential distruction on impact. These scenes would require extensive particle effects and thus be very render intensive scenes. Since the immersive fulldome format requires you to create a 360 degree by 180 degree view of the scene, these scenes were even more complex than those created in special effect movies... with no framing edges and much longer time lengths. Ten to twenty second lengths were expected, much more than the typical movie effect, which lasts just a few seconds long.

This dramatic fulldome sequence for "Impact Earth" will initially premier at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Burke Baker Planetarium and then will be available for licensed distribution as part of the NASA Immersive Earth Project. The scene was created using Maya Unlimited software for the modeling, animation and rendering and Shake software for compositing.

Click here for Quicktime movie of the Future Impact Scenario