NewScientist.com, the online version of the pop science mag New Scientist posted a short article on their blog called “Beware: It’s raining creepy crawlies” about our latest dome short Jeepers Creepers. There’s also a small, flat video dome-master version of the short at the top of their blog post. The short was just premiered over the weekend at the 2011 Fulldome UK festival and hopefully will be showing next month at the Immersive Film Festival in Espinho, Portugal.

Update:
Jeepers Creepers is also blogged about on SyFy Channel’s blog – DVICE. The best part is that the title for their post starts with the word, “Ew.” As is Ewwwwww…bugs.

We’ve been absolutely buried working on our new show so none of us has gotten the chance to post anything on the blog lately. Recently, however, I was purusing the Dome-L listserv and came across an interesting post by Jim Sweitzer from Science Communications Consultants, a firm that consults on planetarium planning and programming. He was responding to a question by Mr. Huseynov at the new planetarium in the city of Baku (Azerbaijan?) and gave some good tips for new fulldome system owners:

1. Don’t invest in a major in-house production team. You should be cautious in launching into major full-dome video productions. They can be quite expensive produce at times and assembling a production team is challenging and difficult to sustain. Even the most well funded planetariums have difficulties keeping production teams going. If you really need a show that you can’t purchase from a vendor, then hire an experienced producer who has a good track record. It will be cheaper in the long run.

2. Invest in good pre-rendered shows: We are in a better place than we were years ago because there are numerous excellent, pre-rendered full-dome shows available. You couldn’t afford to produce any of them for any where near what they cost to lease. If you choose wisely, you will be able to use them for a long time.

3. Invest in your operating and presenting staff: Rather than try and develop a production team, I might suggest that you develop the skills of yourin-house staff to really be able to use the real time software that came with your system. All the vendors’ software is now quite mature and sophisticated. Mastering it well and also making sure your presenters are well versed in the science will be the best “production” path you can take. This means making sure they attend the vendors trainings and also get to visit good analog planetariums around the world. Make sure they can also talk about the latest subjects your audiences see in the news too.

4. Couple pre-rendered shows with live, real-time session: I continue to find the most effective and lively planetarium offerings. I see around the world are ones that join a great pre-rendered show with a live session. Give your audiences a one-hour experience that includes contact with a knowledgeable presenter and you will please your audiences.

5. Work hard on marketing your new planetarium. This cannot be neglected if you want to be successful, especially with a new and innovative theater. “Framing” is a term used in America to characterize, in this case, your planetarium. I’m not sure what is appealing in Baku, but one “frame” that I think can work well with new digital planetariums is to characterize them as “space exploration simulators.” They are ultimately based upon flight simulator technology. Make your audiences think that you are going to fly them around outer space. This type of approach is much better than characterizing them as “visualization theaters” or “immersive experiences.” I might get in trouble with some with this opinion, but I feel that the latter two frames are too abstract and un-engaging for typical audiences. Whatever you do, make sure people understand it’s not simply a big round cinema.

I think Jim’s made some excellent points. (However, if Morehead listened to the first point, I’d be out of a job right now) I especially agree with point number four – coupling pre-rendered shows with live shows. As great as the pre-rendered shows are, you can really get a crowd excited and engaged with a view of the night sky and a short hop through the universe with real-time software such as DigitalSky or Uniview.

What I’m curious about is characterizing new fulldome theaters as “space exploration simulators” as opposed to “immersive experiences.” Has anyone else tried this?

This image is amazing and looks like it’s ripe for the dome. It’s even already in a dome master. Someone out there should work with this guy (Chris Kotsiopoulos, who lives in Athens, Greece) to make some interesting content. A little background, this is how Chris says he did it:

After wondering for some time whether it was possible to image the sky from one morning to the next where I live in Athens Greece, I decided to give it a try. After hours of planning and preparation, and a full day of shooting, the image above is the result of this labor of love. It took me about 12 hours to pull together and process a single image that included over 500 star trails, 35 shots of the Sun and 25 landscape pictures. My plan was to make the image on the day of the solstice (December 21) when the Sun’s stay in the sky was short (in the Northern Hemisphere) and the star trail durations were long. Of course, trying to find clear weather for a given 24-hour period is not an easy chore. However, I was patient, and the weather eventually cooperated (on December 30-31, 2010). I had to stay at the same place for approximately 30 hours. In addition, I was on location 2-3 hours before sunrise in order to make the preparations and test shooting. I also needed to stay an extra 2-3 hours the second day so as to shoot part of the Sun’s sequence that I lost the first morning due to clouds. I chose Sounion (Temple of Poseidon) as the setting for this project. Click on image to see labels.

I began the shooting the morning of December 30, 2010, taking photos with my camera on a tripod facing east. The day portion of this shoot is composed of a dozen shots covering the landscape from east to west as well as the Sun’s course across the sky, from sunrise to sunset. I recorded the Sun’s position exactly every 15 minutes using an intervalometer, with an astrosolar filter adjusted to the camera lens. In one of the shots, when the Sun was near its maximum altitude, I removed the filter in order to capture a more dramatic shot that showed the Sun’s “glare.” After sunset, I took various shots with the camera facing west-northwest in order to achieve a more smooth transition from the day portion to the night portion of the image. The night portion is also composed of a dozen landscape shots but this time from west to east. After the transition” shots, I took a short star trail sequence of approximately half an hour duration, with the camera facing northwest. At 7:30, I turned the camera to the north and started taking the “all-night” star trail shots — lasting almost 11 hours. After accomplishing this, I then turned the camera to northeast and shot another short half an hour star trail sequence, and then finally, with the camera now facing east-northeast, I took a series of night-to-day transition shots.

Are the folks at the Athens Planetarium producing content? Get this guy on your team.

(Gizmodo via EPOD)

Our first fulldome short, “Jeepers Creepers,” will have its world premiere at the Fulldome UK 2011 festival in mid-March. We’re pretty psyched because it will be the first time anyone will see the short outside of folks from Morehead. I won’t give away the premise, suffice to say that if you’re not yet afraid of insects, you might be after it’s over. Pete wrote a short blog post about it when we were in the development phase to give you a little sense of the plot.

Fulldome UK 2011 is being held at the Thinktank Science Museum in Birmingham and has some interesting dome content lined up and some great looking sessions such as shooting with a RED for the dome by a pro steadicam operator, “Storytelling in the Dome” by NSC Creative and “Adventures in Fulldome cinemetography” by Phil Mayer from GaiaNova.  Who wants to buy me a plane ticket?

In an older post I talked about the camera rig we use for our planetarium shows. I also uploaded it incase there were some people that wanted to use it as a springboard or to get ideas of how to make their own.

Well in light of Pete getting a fisheye lens to work, I went ahead and updated our rig.

Here’s our brand new camera rig with all the bells and whistles. Able to switch between the FK system in the old camera rig, and an aiming constraint for the young at heart. A non-renderable dome sits on top so that you can get a sense of what will be visible to the audience. There’s also another camera which can used to look around via aiming constraint for playblasting animation.

These were made in Maya 2008, but could easily be brought into newer versions.

5Camera

Fisheye

And lastly, both of them zipped together.

Recent work on this project has produced a wonderful revelation. I’ve been working almost exclusively in Maya for this project, and this is a big deal for me because I’m traditionally a 3ds Max guy.

One of the hurtles we had created a work around for was the toon shader and how it reacted to lighting scenarios. I discussed this in my previous blog post “Have it both ways.” Since we don’t have a R&D team we make our developments on the fly. I recently discovered you could use 1 image file and then duplicate it in Maya and alter its color gain to create the various levels of shading in the toon shader.

Then I took it a step further. I started tinkering around and discovered something that simplified our production by reducing our render passes.

I realized you could take a toon shader and plug that in as the color value of a standard shader, thus having your cake and eating it too.

We’re outta here. See you next year!

With this next project, we’re trying something a little unconventional. Something to try and spice things up a bit. As if generating fulldome content weren’t difficult enough?

One of the problems we ran into using a toon shader is that it doesn’t accept lighting color information or calculate shadows very well.

So, by taking a color pass and a grey scale pass you can combine them and season to taste.

The final test result is what you see here.

The wrap deformer was something that I didn’t learn about while I was going to school, but instead something I only learned about recently. It is an incredibly useful tool that can help add an extra dimension to characters and animation.

What the wrap deformer essentially is (atleast to my untrained eye in character rigging), is a way to have geometry influence an object seperate from it. It’s influence is based on proximity. What it effects is not the object as a whole, but the vertices; or in this particular case the lattice of another object.

This is an example of an eye from a character in our new show. The details on how wraps work exactly would be best read in the book I linked too in an earlier post:

Which you can find here

And here’s how it looks without a wrap:

What a difference!

Once you start to use the process it becomes quicker to make. Some important things to remember is that the object which is the deformer will not render, so it’s good to have a second head as the deformer, and make it affect a blendshape to go to the real eye.

This of course isn’t just limited to eyes but also teeth and anything else you can think of that you want to add some motion too.

We’re looking for a local (North Carolina – Triangle area) Maya character animator for a 3 month freelance gig starting January 15th. We’d like someone who is/has:

fluent in Autodesk Maya

facial animation and lip sync skills

solid understanding of animation principals (Arcs, Anticipation, Timing, etc.)

open to changes in direction when needed

team player

detail oriented

If you have all that and rigging experience, it’ll put you over the top.

If you’re interested, please email me at jayheinz@unc.edu with a copy of your resume and a link to your portfolio.  You’ll need to work on-site in our secret lair, so brush up on your ninja skills.