So for most of 2018 and 2019 I worked on a planetarium show called Signs of Life for the Samuel Oschin Planetarium at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. The show was supposed to come out in June 2020 but COVID-19 made that impossible like so many other movies, concerts, and other events, I don’t need to tell you how crappy this year has been. Anyways… these images are a few stills from shots I worked on. I worked on many more shots but they don’t want to release anything until after the show actually comes out, hopefully in 2021.
I’m really proud of this show, it was the coolest project I’ve ever been a part of and I worked with THE BEST people in the industry. I’m glad I can share just these few images, all of them were collaborations. I did the models and textures for the barren landscape of one of the exo-planets in the Trappist system. I also did the textures (Mari and ZBrush) for the proto-planet scene. Its incredible to see in a full dome. These were rendered in Arnold for Maya and composited with matte paintings and a lot of love in Nuke by some of the other team members (my Nuke skill are pretty basic). We had to do the entire show using fish eye renders from Arnold which made animation and rendering a really interesting challenge. Images were 8196 x 8196 and the show is 35 minutes all CG at 60 FPS. That is a lot of very large images - keep in mind we had to render many passes too. It was a beast of a show. I hope it comes out soon because it really is an incredible planetarium show and its already won some awards . Check out the video I linked to from a panel discussion (Me, Tom Bradley, and Gee Yeung) at last year’s ZSummit in Hollywood CA. The show is about the history of searching for life in the universe and what scientists look for when they search for living things on far away worlds.
There was loads and loads and loads of ZBrush in this show and Pixologic was extremely supportive!! Thanks to Jaime and Paul for all their help!!
