Computer Graphics World

JULY 2010

Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/14320

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 46 of 83

Scientific Visualization n n n n these non-scripted (as well as scripted) galactic journeys is scientifically accurate, based on im- agery from NASA and often compliments of the Hubble Space Telescope. According to Dan Neafus, operations man- ager at the Gates Planetarium, the current sys- tem and setup enables the facility to offer three types of programs in the dome: pre-rendered films produced out of house and licensed by the planetarium, programs created on site, and real-time presentations, which can involve space travel or tertiary-related content. According to Neafus, the planetarium has University of Colorado, whose flight-simula- tion software brought the imagery to life. Most of the scenes in the show were generated using traditional computer animation techniques, visualizations of numerical simulations, model reconstructions based on observed data, and Hamilton’s real-time general relativistic flight simulator. Te group at the museum played an executive management role, using a suite of Adobe software running on HP workstations to composite and edit the imagery, as well as mix the audio and video, before previewing it to be sure it would deliver well on the dome screen. In addition to using HP work- stations to generate proprietary pieces, the xw8400 machines with quad-core processing technology are also used in one of the museum’s playback systems. Each worksta- tion (equipped with quad-core Intel duplicate of this system, allowing personnel to jump between the two—one configured with Linux and the other with Windows— while doing after-hours and test work as to not interfere with the bay system that runs the daily shows. “Te majority of the work we did on Black Holes was to help the show’s director, Tom Lu- cas, and production group get a good under- standing of how the final product would look on a dome screen,” says Neafus. “Lucas had extensive HD TV and film experience, but had not produced for the dome before. Te supercomputer group [from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications] had a good amount of dome experience, but they had to make sure what they were sending and rendering actually looked good on our screen. Too many production [crews] don’t take the effort to check what they are doing to be sure two diverse categories of shows that are run- ning now. Te first, which the facility distrib- utes to other theaters worldwide, is called Black Holes: Te Other Side of Infinity. Te program features high-end supercomputer renderings of galactic and black-hole phenomena, and the Denver role was to use on-site equipment for compositing work and editing. Te second program is Cosmic Journey: A Solar System Ad- venture, which is a tour of the solar system that the local crew created entirely in-house and will be releasing for distribution. Exploring Black Holes In the museum-produced show Black Holes, viewers embark on a virtual adventure in- side one of these cosmic curiosities, “zipping through otherworldly wormholes, experienc- ing the creation of the Milky Way Galaxy, and witnessing the violent death of a star and subsequent birth of a black hole,” promises the planetarium on its Web site. Te experience got off the ground thanks to Andrew Hamilton, an astrophysicist at the The Gates team encourages and assists those wanting to take advantage of their local resource, in hopes of extending content development on this platform. Here, university students created animated backdrops for their production of “Joan of Arc,” held at the planetarium. Xeon processors and Nvidia 5500 graphics cards) is set up in a parallel array and linked to a corresponding F30 digital light processing (DLP) projector from Projection Design situ- ated across the interior of the 125-seat domed theater. (Te current array has five projectors around the perimeter and one at the apex.) Te system works in tandem, and the images are blended together to create a seamless image that, when projected onto the dome, simulates a nighttime sky. Te dome itself is 57 feet in diameter and is situated at a 25-degree tilted angle, projecting 3600 x 3600 imagery. Another HP workstation acts as a seventh channel, serving as a control node for the master unit, processing the images within the 3D software and sending them to the other workstations. In fact, the planetarium has a that they create a good, immersive audience experience.” Verification by the Gates staff involved a series of setups, going from the high-resolu- tion dome master—kind of a film snapshot of the whole dome—to slicing the imagery up for the individual projectors and then having those compressed and formatted so they could play and stream back on the video players. Called “slicing,” the process is typically done offline on the workstations with proprietary software. In essence, the big image is divided among the visual projectors and compiled in a proprietary format for streaming off the hard drives quickly and efficiently. For Black Holes, the Gates Planetarium staff worked with a range of collaborators, and each had their own preferred tools. In fact, the July 2010 45

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of Computer Graphics World - JULY 2010