I spent some time last weekend re-lighting and re animating my Orrery model. I gave the environment a lick of paint while I was at it too! It was nice to have a little break from working on my short film, and get stuck into something a little more abstract, but rest assured I’m still hard at work on that endeavour too!
You can read a little more about the project here!
And if you’d like to have a go at creating something similar, take a look at my text based tutorial.
This time we will be looking at the Martian surface, where a number of shots for the film take place. Bonestell painted many artworks depicting the Martian surface, with hypothesised Mars landers, and domed habitats within craters.
An astronaut returning to the Mars Lander.
The above is a viewport render from Cinema 4D. The scene, for once, is actually a relatively simple one. The original painting (below) depicts the Mars Lander skimming across the Martian surface on skis. This was the initial idea of how a spacecraft would land on the Red Planet. Of course, now we know that a vertical landing, aided by either a parachute or thrusters, would be the most likely scenario.
My initial plan was to simulate the craft skimming across the surface. However, given that I’m a one-man band with many shots to get through, I made the decision to instead have the craft at a halt and introduce some movement into the shot with an explorer returning to the lander.
As for the craft itself, I created a hybrid between two concepts: the one seen in the painting below and another taken from the cover of The Exploration of Mars (1956). I was lucky enough to find a nearly pristine copy of this book in a charity/thrift shop—they are very hard to find and usually very expensive!
Bonestell’s painting of the Mars Lander.
Below is my reimagination of the painting. I wanted a more silhouetted look, as it helps the reveal in the next shot stand out more. The paintings are all quite similar in colour, and I wanted to ensure that, in the film, there is more distinction from shot to shot, as to steer away from monotony.
My reimagination of the painting
One significant change is the colour tone. While I want to preserve the essence of Bonestell’s paintings, I also aim to incorporate greater scientific accuracy where possible. The original painting portrays a scene with red tones reminiscent of Earth’s sunsets (though the sun’s angle isn’t entirely clear, as the lighting comes from behind the ‘camera’). On Mars, however, sunlight passing through its thin atmosphere interacts with fine dust particles, producing a blue sunset instead of the red and orange hues typical on Earth. This effect, known as forward scattering, occurs because the fine dust scatters blue light more effectively in the forward direction, creating the Martian sunset’s distinct blue glow. That said, I chose to introduce some more familiar sunset colours to help the audience better connect with the scene.
The clouds and dust were simulated in Embergen, then brought into Cinema 4D as VDBs and rendered in Redshift 3D. There is a very subtle sandstorm in the background of the shot to bring some life to the desolate planet. I’ve been working with a fantastic character model, which I have altered slightly to better fit the retro-futuristic astronauts Bonestell drew while keeping them feeling modern enough to suit a scenario where this could actually take place.
Bonestell’s painting of a Domed colony on Mars, with Olympus Mons in the background.
This is one of the paintings I was most excited to recreate. The landscape itself was something I really looked forward to generating, as well as working on the composition.
One of the difficulties of moving from World Creator (where I generate the landscapes) into Redshift in Cinema 4D is matching the displacement map (which is calculated at render time) to a proxy geometry mesh in the viewport. The different scales and colour spaces mean getting a perfect match can be a bit of trial and error. I have worked out a reliable way to match the displacement map to the proxy, which I plan to make a short tutorial on—so watch this space!
I love the composition of this shot. There is a lovely separation between the foreground, middleground, and background elements, which I really wanted to capture. One thing, however, that I wanted to change was the sense of scale. Something about the size of the domes didn’t quite work for me, as it seemed to minimize the size of the crater wall around the colony. Below is what I came up with.
My recreation
Some other technical considerations for this shot included the atmospheric scattering of sunlight. The density changes from the surface of the planet, visible where Olympus Mons rises out of the atmosphere. This was created with a couple of techniques, which I’d be happy to make a short tutorial on.
In short, pulling the scene data out within a volume material using a Redshift ‘State’ node allowed me to clamp the volume and remap it with a gradient to control where the scattering took place (scene left, and below a certain value on the Y-axis). This allowed me to have some sun rays creeping over the crater’s rim to the left and occlude the bottom of the mountain (which was rendered separately and combined in post). I then used additional layers in After Effects to very slightly break up the volume.
As always, I don’t want to share everything, so below is a teaser for the next shot on Mars. When the film releases, there will be a much more detailed write-up of each shot with much more concept material, technical breakdowns, and WIPs (including the ones we’ve already covered), which I can’t wait to share.
I hope you enjoyed reading this latest installment of my development diary.
Another showreel! Last year was one of my busiest yet, and despite having to take a couple of months off due to an repetitive strain type injury, I was still able to deliver 21 different projects over the year. I can’t wait to see what this 2025 has in store!
Mars as seen from Deimos - Chesley Bonestell
Since my last blog entry I’ve scratched off a few more shots, and while I work out some of the details for perhaps the most complex shot of the film, I thought I’d take a break and do a small progress update.
While I don’t want to share progress on every single shot (so there are still some unknowns upon first viewing!), I will share a few stills from some completed shots.
Deimos is one of Mars’ two moons, the other being Phobos. Bonestell has paintings of both of these locations, and they are quite similar in look. For Dreamt Futures, I have taken ideas from the paintings of both locations, to create something that is still very recognisable as Bonestell’s artwork and composition, but bringing a little extra of my own flare.
I really enjoy Bonstell’s composition with Mars contrasting the view of the rocky surface of Deimos, and casting a red reflection. I wanted to take these concepts and push them a little further, to draw more attention to the astronauts in the painting. By moving the camera around and punching in a little closer, I managed to create more of a focus on the humans exploring the landscape and admiring the views of Mars.
Viewport view of the 3D scene in Cinema 4D
Deimos has an extremely low gravitational force - if you were standing on the surface and jumped, you would be at escape velocity! The Astronaut Explorer sitting on the rock in this shot is saving his friend from floating away after getting up a little too fast.
The lighting was a little trickier to set up here, I’m using multiple light sources to cast the highlights in the right areas, and still look realistic. For Mars, I created a new atmosphere shader, altering a set up I have used for Earth in the past. The technique involves remapping a Fresnel node to drive a subsurface colour, and another Fresnel node to control the opacity of the redshift material - this is then applied to a sphere which sits on top of the surface of the planet. With this set up you have good control of the depth and falloff of the atmosphere, as well as colour gradients.
Saturn as seen from Mimas - Chesley Bonestell
The second shot to talk about today is of Mimas, one of the moons of Saturn. Let’s first take a look at Bonestells depiction of the moon.
This is one of my favourite Bonestell paintings. The lighting on Saturn looks almost translucent, and the shadowing of the rings and moon being cast back onto the surface of Saturn are a sight to see. The biggest challenge in recreating this scene is the sense of scale. When creating landscape renders, we are used to using Atmosphere/Environment shaders. These help create a sense of depth as a viewer, and a graduation of colour as the view vanishes over the horizon. With a small rocky moon, there is no atmosphere, so it is hard to convey this concept. and keep realism in mind.
Looking at the foreground rocks in the image, I decided these would be the best way to help illustrate the scale of the landscape. The problem to solve then is how am I going to have millions of rocks active in a scene?
I used high quality proxy models of rocks for the first third of the image, and swapped them out for extremely low LOD proxies as they were positioned further away from the camera, and decreased in scale. I then instanced the proxies, and placed them into a Matrix Scatter. This allowed me to scatter a huge amount of geometry and not run out of VRAM when it came to rendering.
The base landscape was generated in World Creator, it is a 1km/1km base, which I used to scatter the geometry across. The base landscape was then exported as a TIFF, brought into Cinema 4D and displaced using Redshift. I used a displacer modifier in C4D and matched the elevation. This geometry was then used for the scatter, but swapped out for the displacement map in the final render. Most of the foreground elements were hand placed, so I had a good stage to animate the explorers wandering across the barren moon.
Lastly, to create a greater sense of depth, I created a ground ‘fog’. Although not present in real life, a subtle fog helps emulate the sense of moon dust which could be displaced above the surface of Mimas (especially when being disturbed by intrepid explorers!
Viewport view of the 3D scene in Cinema 4D
While I love this Bonestell painting - its tone and colour arent quite right for what I am going for in Dreamt Futures - this will become more clear when watching the film with the shots in sequence. For Mimas, I decided to go for a much brighter look, with over exposed highlights, and darker shadows. I feel this helps create a feeling of a harsher alien environment.
That’s all I’ll be sharing for today. I hope you enjoyed reading, and having a sneak peak at a couple of shots. Remember to check back for updates in the future!
I'm deep into the post-production phase for Dreamt Futures. With storyboarding done and a previz edit complete, I'm excited to share some updates. Five shots are finished, and the remaining 20 plus are in various stages, from planning and layout to just getting started. In this post, I'll talk a bit about the production of the first two shots and share some stills without giving too much away.
The film begins in the hills outside San Jose, California, at the historic Lick Observatory. The main building houses the Great Lick Telescope, a massive 36-inch refractor. Both the telescope and the observatory are named in honor of James Lick, who dedicated much of his wealth to scientific endeavours, including the construction of the world's most powerful telescope at the time. When James Lick died in 1876, he was the wealthiest man in California and is actually buried in a tomb beneath the telescope.
The Lick Observatory in winter. The Large dome is where the Great Lick Telescope is housed.
Space artist Chesley Bonestell (who Dreamt Futures is focused on) born just two days before the telescope's first light in 1888, visited the observatory as a child. Viewing Saturn through the newly built telescope ignited his passion for space. This moment also serves as the inspiration for the film's opening scene.
Cinema 4D Viewport rendering of the scene set up.
To create the landscape, I carefully reshaped areas of the terrain where the observatory is located and filled in the background with DEM earth. This approach ensures the landscape closely resembles the actual location, using satellite imagery and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data for accurate terrain height.
The pink and green blocks represent foliage scattered across the landscape. I added more trees around the observatory than there are in reality. This artistic choice helps break up the horizon lines and creates a more interesting gradation of shading, enhancing the sense of depth, distance, and scale. Placing trees on the more distant hills (in pink) also adds realism; the varied tree heights break up the horizon line and help the viewer gauge the distance to the city in the background.
For the outskirts of San Jose in the distance, I scattered particles across the geometry in both random and grid-like patterns to mimic streets. I used emissive materials to light these particles, simulating city lights, and slightly randomised their colours from white to gold, with some green and red lights to represent traffic signals. I also applied a subtle twinkling animation to some of the lights.
Additionally, I added clouds generated in Embergen to create further separation between the landscape layers. This adds an engaging level of contrast and balance, helping to silhouette the observatory structures and trees.
The final shot - modern day San Jose and the Lick Observatory. The shot was composited in After Effects (Including a heat haze effect over the city which was controlled via a depth pass), and graded in Premiere Pro.
Viewport view of the Telescope Scene
The Telescope soon after it’s opening in the late 1800s
I knew creating the telescope itself was going to be one of the more challenging and time-consuming aspects of the films production, which is why it was tackled early. It needed to be modelled in detail for two shots, one at very close range and one at middle distance. Finding good reference photos and understanding how the telescope moved and operated was quite a challenge due to the lack of available reference material. However, I managed to find some great pictures on Flickr from people's holiday snaps and got to work re-creating the scene.
The second challenge was the domed structure that houses the telescope. An intricate truss-like structure supports the dome, along with mechanisms below that open the huge doors to the stars and orient the observatory. I modeled the telescope in Cinema 4D, then textured, lit, and rendered it with Redshift 3D. For the telescope material, I created an entirely procedural shader to imitate paint wear and tear and heavy rusting in certain areas. The telescope is well over 100 years old now, so it isn’t quite as shiny as when Bonestell first saw Saturn!
Lighting this scene was extremely satisfying, as the structure creates incredible shadow patterns. Normally, the lights would be off to preserve night vision and achieve the best clarity for viewing celestial bodies through the telescope. However, for a film shot, complete darkness wouldn't work. There are some red lights for visibility within the observatory building, so I took some artistic license and increased their intensity to light up the dome.
One of the finished shots of the Lick Telescope and Observatory dome - you’ll have to wait for the full release for the other!
I hope you enjoyed a peak behind the scenes at how the filmmaking process has worked for these first two shots. There will be more to come in the near future!