Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/14320
n n n n Scientific Visualization personnel used Uniview, a Windows-based astronomical visualization and universal data exploration platform. “Simply put, it is a real- time tool that lets you fly through the uni- verse,” says Neafus. Uniview contains a library of information for cosmic objects—the Earth, for instance. “You have the correct orbital information, tex- ture maps to layer onto a sphere, the surface, and so forth,” Neafus explains. “Te architec- ture is parallel to a typical modeling program, but in this case, you are dealing with real time, and the system moves closer to a video game architecture for fast polygon counts, fast re- fresh … those kinds of things.” While Uniview can run on various plat- forms, for the planetarium’s usage, it is set up on both of the HP systems dedicated to the development and experimental work. Te first incarnation of the program was done using the SGI equipment back in 2003. Since then, the group has implemented other tools and upgraded the visualization with new terrain data and texture maps. Now, it is developing Unity’s game development/visualization soft- ware for the flythroughs. Te Denver group licenses the Uniview The capabilities of the Gates Planetarium setup enable cosmic flythroughs on the fly (top), as well as more “down-to-earth” applications, including generation of digital backgrounds during live concerts. group came together serendipitously. Ham- ilton was from Boulder, Colorado, and the director, Tom Lucas, from New York City; while both were in Denver, they met up and brainstormed with a third partner, Mike Bruno, from dome fabricator Spitz’s digital content group. Tey applied for a National Science Foundation grant, and when that was approved, they moved forward with the work, bringing in other experts to contribute to the project. Te Black Hole flight simulator was a pro- prietary tool that Hamilton had built from scratch using raw code written in C++ and incarnations of the SGI architecture. Another contributor was James Arthurs, who worked as a contractor using NewTek’s LightWave; he delivered the dome master to the Gates group for editing and splicing. “Te NCSA group uses tools that are proprietary and primarily based on SGI Performer that they migrated to other tools for creating the high-resolution galactic flythroughs and, more particularly, for creating the raw scientific visualization,” says 46 July 2010 Neafus. A good deal of the tools used by the production team were developed specifically for this project. “We gave them storyboards, and they worked as a subcontractor crew to provide a specific visual,” says Neafus of the visualization team. Lucas provided hard-copy sketches that were scanned and manipulated, then inserted into an animatic created within Apple’s Final Cut and Adobe’s Premiere to give the subcon- tractors a feel for the piece and how it should look. Te final scenes, says Neafus, were full 3D and rendered fisheye style in the final pass. Journey to the Stars Te show Cosmic Journey: A Solar System Ad- venture also put the in-house setup to the test. Te current version of the pre-rendered show Cosmic Journey is the museum’s fourth; it takes audiences on a trip through the solar system at many times the speed of light, stopping along the way for a close-up look at certain planets and their moons, which are shown in scien- tific detail. To update this show, the museum database, which works with its multichannel systems, for demonstrating solar system phe- nomenon and flying around the galaxy and stars. “All the imagery is accurate and to scale, and all of it is near-photorealistic,” adds Nea- fus. “It’s a very powerful tool.” For Cosmic Journey, Neafus and an in-house team did frame grabs of a flight sequence they devised, utilizing the real-time Uniview navi- gator/viewing software as a high-end anima- tion tool. As they conducted the flythrough in real time, they recorded it, though Neafus had to make the journey many times before getting it to time just right with the prerecorded nar- ration. Once he had a perfect flythrough, he kicked it off to rendering. Rendering for the real-time system as well as the dome playback is a frame-capture algorithm—not a multipass, as is the case for most 3D animation tools. “It is WYSIWYG, but it can handle what we are doing,” he notes. Te output from the Uniview and real-time frame captures requires a great deal of com- positing and tweaking, which the staff does in Adobe After Effects. Dealing with such issues as color, contrast, antialiasing, shading, and layering can be more painstaking than the im- age creation itself, Neafus says, “You have to nail them perfectly.” When model creation is necessary, the plan- etarium staff also uses Autodesk’s Maya and Maxon’s Cinema 4D software tools.