Welcome to the Home Run Pictures "Inside the Production" page. With each new entry in this "diary," we will discuss, in a fairly detailed fashion, the creative and production process for creating various scenes for a fulldome show currently in production. Will we be giving away any "secrets?" Maybe, but our main goal is really to show the problem-solving process our pipeline at Home Run Pictures goes through in creating for fulldome. Hopefully everyone reading this diary can gleen something that will help in their own creative or production process.
INTRODUCTION:
A show currently in production is "Impact: Earth," initially for the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Burke Baker Planetarium and then as part of the NASA Immersive Earth Project, for licensed distribution. The show will be about 20 minutes in length and Home Run Pictures is producing about half of the planned scenes. The story wraps around the idea that the Earth lives in a dangerous neighborhood... with rocks, large and small impacting our planet in the past, present and future.
DIARY POST 1:
An early scene in the show revolves around the concept of a witness to a meteor impact in central North America about 10,000 years ago. The area, which today is the state of Kansas, is the site where the Houston Museum of Natural Science unearthed a 150 pound meteorite fragment. NASA ground penetrating radar was partly used to locate the meteorite, the same technology that in the near future will be part of a Mars rover mission looking for deep ground water.
The theory derived from the locations of several hundred meteorite finds is that a larger meteor entered the atmosphere, exploded and scattered fragments across a wide arc over the Kansas site. The positions indicate that the rock at first "peeled" outer layers scattering rocks along its path, then eventually exploded, scattering even more rocks. The museum's personel dated the meteorite impact at around 8000 BC. It is possible that a paleo-indian observer could have witnessed the impact. Our scene visualizes just such a possible witness to the fireball's streak across the Kansas sky.
Our first goal was to establish a stage for our scene with dramatic potential. We came up with a short written description of our scene idea... "a paleo-indian huddled over a fire at a forest edge, winter-time with snow covering the ground... the snow being an easier render to achieve realistically, etc. " We decided it had to be a night scene to get the most dramatic effect of the meteor's explosive entry. The tall trees would give us the "looming" height that works so well in fulldome compositions. The flickering fire would softly light the paleo-indian as well as the surrounding forest of trees with a warming glow creating an initial calm ambience. We added in an entire campsite of deerskin huts for more human interest, our lone witness standing as sentry for the camp late at night. The fireball becomes a disruption to the peacefull setting, with the sharp-edged light from the explosion casting dancing shadows across the camp site. Below is the storyboard that was drawn up for approvals and pre-production planning... just quick sketches with written decsriptions that will be developed further as we go into production of the completely CGI scene.
Next step was to to do research on the look of the camp and our paleo-indian. One of our animators working on the project has a degree in archeology and was a perfect person to come up with appropriate details for our scene. A selection of concept images was collected from books and the internet, small sketches for layout and production planning, then character and props construction was started.
Although we had used motion capture for Mars exploring astronauts in a previous show, the Buhl Planetarium's "Traveler's Guide To Mars," it was decided that since our "witness" was not speaking and motion was limited, we would just keyframe the action. Using Maya Unlimited software, our basic character was modeled using a polygon approach. Maya does have NURBS and subdivision surface capability, but a larger part of our experience has been with poly characters, so that was an obvious route to follow. And since the mo-cap pipeline we had used for the Mars show had been with poly... if we decided later to mo-cap the character, we had that option without needing to remodel our paleo-indian.
We used the Maya Full Body IK toolset for our character rigging and the Maya Hair toolset to give the witness long hair that responded to his movement. The Maya FBIK is a great tool for giving good motion to a character. It has some built-in sutleness already programmed in... for example, lift the character's leg and the body adjusts to keep the center-of-balence... stomp the foot and the body reacts to the weight of the dynamic force. UV texturing for color and texture was initially created in ZBrush and then tweaked in Photoshop.
The camp site huts were modeled and the tall fir trees for the forest were imported from model libraries we had created for a previous show, "Dinosaur Prophecy." The camp fire would be Maya Fluids. Here are some production test rendered images of our models and scene elements. The streak in the sky is the proposed path for our fireball.
That's it for this diary post. Next time we will discuss the animation pipeline along with the particle scripting creation for the meteor fireball... then later, scene staging and lighting before final render and compositing.
TC
