Dreamt Futures - Dev Blog #02

August 2, 2024

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

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 tricker 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.

Mimas

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!

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!

Dreamt Futures - Dev Blog #01

May 28, 2024

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.

Lick Observatory

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.

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.

Shot Production

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 randomized their colors 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.

The Telescope

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!

DREAMT FUTURES: Bonestell

July 5, 2023

Rockets, rocks, planets, people and more. This will be a tribute film to Chesley Bonestell, re-imagining a number of his artworks in an immersive experience.

The film will be released in Cinemascope format, making the environments even more captivating. A number of shots will also be delivered as standalone experiences in full 360 VR. See you on Titan.

If you’re interested in keeping up with the project, it’s creation will be documented here on this Blog.

DREAMT FUTURES: Bonestell coming soon page.

~ James

The Making of 'The Interstellar Medium' #6 - Saturn's Rings

April 27, 2017

Saturn is a cool planet. It has rings, over 60 moons and is made of gasses - this always amazed me from even a young age - I remember reading 'The Magic School Bus Explores the Solar System' and then playing the computer game on my fathers computer. The rings in particular really captivated me... But we're getting a little off topic here, lets get a little more into the shot itself.

But just before we do that, this shot is actually somewhat accurate to how astrophysicists believe the rings may look. The shot takes place at the innermost 'D' ring of Saturn, which is the least dense ring.

So, this shot was to set the scene of Saturn, the next shot was fairly static so some movement here was necessary, so the rings felt like a good way to achieve this. The rings were made of many standard geometric shapes (cubes, spheres, pyramids) which were randomised in scale and vertex position, and then displaced via a displacement texture. These objects were then cloned, randomised, and had dynamics applied to them. This cause a lot of playback issues, but by separating each set of rocks (of which there were 10) into separate scene-files, I was able to work efficiently and get near real-time playback. I also rendered them seperately with depth passes as this left me more flexibility in post. Here is the C4D scene with all the ring ice (yes, they're made of ice, not rocks!) merged into one file.

The below image shows the ring texture (which was an alpha material) being used to create the shadow on Saturn's surface and atmpsphere.

In post I had to do a little masking and re-positioning of layers, and then added in a light near the top to highlight Pioneer's location. Click the image above for a more detailed view!

And there you have it! The full sequence will be available for viewing once the film is release. Thanks for reading!

The Making of 'The Interstellar Medium' #5 - The Asteroid Belt

April 27, 2017

I've done a lot of typing, and you've done a lot of reading - so here is a video of me sculpting an asteroid in Mudbox and doing some test compositing in After Effects, all to some repetitive music. This was part of my research into sculpting asteroid, and I ended up making 6/7 other asteroids for the final shot, however only 4 were used in the end.

Okay, so there is a little more reading... The final shot as two of the asteroids impacting each oth- yes, I KNOW that asteroids in the Asteroid Belt aren't this close together (by a good 600,000 miles), it would have been a damned miracle if anything made it through the belt given it is around 1 AU wide. But rocks smashing into each other is pretty cool, so lets throw astrophysics out of the window for this one (again). Okay back to the more technical aspects - multiple impact rocks were made in C4D which consisted of mostly very low poly spheres which were then displaced further. I used a number of standard Cinema 4D emitters to sling rocks out from the impact zone in all directions, but with a slight emphases on the direction the asteroids are moving.

Pioneer just survives the impact and glides past the chaos, and using lens effects to emulate sunlight glinting off Pioneers golden foil, I was able to draw the viewers eye from the impact, to Pioneer, and back to the impact. Below is the compositing file, however I wont go into any detail here as it was a fairly straightforward colour correct job other than the flare keyframing and depth passes.

I was aiming for a look similar to the images taken by the Rosetta probe, in terms of visual style, and think the goal was met! Finally, the bit everyone has been waiting for, the final image; and as always, the full sequence will be available for viewing once the film is finished! Thanks for reading.