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' #3 - Aldebaran

April 23, 2017

Aldebaran is a giant orange star in the constellation of Taurus. Pioneer 10 is on a trajectory in the general direction of this star, so it earned a place in my film. I already had one shot of a star in the film, so I needed to make this one particularly stand out.

I decided to create another close up shot, however this time using a particle system to generate huge solar flares across the surface, with Pioneer racing around the star (at a not so safe distance). Despite the clear scientific inaccuracies, I wanted something dramatic, and nothing is quite as dramatic as fireballs exploding from a gigantic orange star.

The particle simulations were done with X-Particles, you can see my set up below:

I set up multiple emissions, one major flare arcing away from the surface, and a few other more subtle ones inside the Star. Using particle groups, I was able to separate each flare and create varied dynamics for each one.

Below, you can see the procedural shader I set up - this consisted of various noise shaders animated in varied ways to get an interesting pattern across the Star's surface. I rendered this as a greyscale image and colourised it in After Effects. Each noise layer from the shader was rendered out individually, as well as a layer which was painted in bodypaint to mask areas where the particle flow was emitted from the Star.

The Pioneer model was also rendered out, and then composited in After Effects. You can see my After Effects scene file below:

Quite a difference right? As you can see I used many adjustment layers, which I can cover more extensively if there is any interest, but they mostly consist of various glow effects, lots of masking, blurs, lots of colour correction and finally distortions.

And, as always, the animated version will be available for viewing once the film is released, for now, here is a screenshot of the composited shot!

The Making of 'The Interstellar Medium' - #2 'The Surface of Mars'

March 6, 2017

Mars was one of the more challenging shots to complete given my time restraints. This shot is particularly unique as it is on the surface of a planet, rather than looking at an object from a distance, whether that be the Pioneer probes which the film revolves around or a planet. Not only was I pressed for time when it came to creating the visual effects, but I was pressed for time when it came to rendering too. This was one of the main issues with this shot, given most of the screen is filled with things that need to be rendered unlike many of the other shots which have matte backgrounds. Through separating everything into separate render passes and rendering those passes individually, as well as lots of tweaking of GI settings, I managed to get my render times a lot more workable (from 50 minutes a frame to around 7-12).

Enough about the rendering though, let's take a look at how I achieved some of the effects. The easiest part to do was the foreground rocks. For these, I used Quixel's Megascans, as it was a fast, relatively inexpensive to create a foreground effect without having to create complex models and find textures myself.

The mid-ground wasn't as straight forward though. After initial research, I downloaded some high resolution images from the HiRise sensor on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The high resolution images are unfortunately in black and white, so using Photoshop, I recoloured them using other photos from the HiRise orbiter that were in colour as reference when painting in details. The black and white image was then brought into B2M to extract height information for use as a displacement map.

The maps were then loaded into a Cinema 4D material and by tweaking displacement settings I was able to achieve the desired effect.

The animated version will be available for viewing once the film is released, for now, here is a screenshot of the composited shot!

The Making of 'The Interstellar Medium' - #1 'Black Holes'

March 5, 2017

One of the first shots I've worked on for this film was one that featured a black hole. After seeing Interstellar's 'Gargantua', I was inspired to create something similar, given the scientific accuracy of Interstellar's black hole.

I worked for a couple of days experimenting with various methods of creating a black hole, my first attempts were in After Effects - hoping to achieve something with various warp and distort effects. The result wasn't convincing, so I moved to Cinema 4D and started experimenting there instead.

I came across a viable method which involved setting up a torus object to take the place of the gravitational lens. Adding a transparent and refractive material to the torus allowed the stars behind to distort through the mesh, and zip around the outside of it. A pure black sphere was placed in the centre to act as the black hole, and then a disk was placed intersecting these two objects, which was animated to rotate. The disk had a texture map applied to it that I built inside Photoshop. Below, you can see an un-textured, and a textured version of the black hole.

A background of stars was loaded into a sky object, and I also composited a separate layer of stars directly behind the black hole to exaggerate the stars movement. The one hindrance that using this effect yielded is that the effect of the stars moving is only controllable based on the cameras position in relation to the torus (which is actually accurate, albeit not that flexible). I came up with a method to keep the distortion the same as the camera moved by having the torus constantly target the camera. This kept the facing of the torus constant, in turn keeping the level of distortion constant.

The animated version will be available for viewing once the film is released, for now, here is a screenshot of the composited shot!