dmaas
01-28-2006, 01:43 AM
Disney's Roving Mars (http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/rovingmars/), a 40-minute IMAX film documenting the ongoing Mars Rover mission, opens in 16 cities today.
I served as visual effects supervisor and lead TD. Assisting me were artists Aja Bogdanoff, John Niehuss, and Benjamin Schweighart, and software developer Justin Wick. We created 12 minutes of CGI for the film (almost 1/3 of its running time), mostly consisting of reconstructions of actual rover activities.
New York Times write-up (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/movies/25mars.html) (registration required)
Tech summary: 90% of the modeling and animation were done in Lightwave. We used my custom pipeline integration package to apply shaders and lighting, to send everything out to PRMan for rendering, and to perform 2D post-processing. We rendered a handful of elements in Lightwave, such as the rocket exhaust (HyperVoxels) and atmospheric entry flames. All of the Mars shots are based on images and 3D geometry returned from the rovers and Mars-orbiting satellites (many scenes are accurate down to the level of individual rocks). The Mars surface terrain was created by applying rover images as color and displacement maps projected onto stand-in geometry. The high-altitude shots use terrain data from the MOLA instrument tessellated into polygons using a custom view-based system. The CGI was rendered at 4K resolution and printed to 15-perf 70mm film. Typical render times were 20-40 minutes per frame, thanks to careful optimizations like pre-baked ambient occlusion, although we skimped a little bit on the raytraced reflections for speed reasons.
I served as visual effects supervisor and lead TD. Assisting me were artists Aja Bogdanoff, John Niehuss, and Benjamin Schweighart, and software developer Justin Wick. We created 12 minutes of CGI for the film (almost 1/3 of its running time), mostly consisting of reconstructions of actual rover activities.
New York Times write-up (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/movies/25mars.html) (registration required)
Tech summary: 90% of the modeling and animation were done in Lightwave. We used my custom pipeline integration package to apply shaders and lighting, to send everything out to PRMan for rendering, and to perform 2D post-processing. We rendered a handful of elements in Lightwave, such as the rocket exhaust (HyperVoxels) and atmospheric entry flames. All of the Mars shots are based on images and 3D geometry returned from the rovers and Mars-orbiting satellites (many scenes are accurate down to the level of individual rocks). The Mars surface terrain was created by applying rover images as color and displacement maps projected onto stand-in geometry. The high-altitude shots use terrain data from the MOLA instrument tessellated into polygons using a custom view-based system. The CGI was rendered at 4K resolution and printed to 15-perf 70mm film. Typical render times were 20-40 minutes per frame, thanks to careful optimizations like pre-baked ambient occlusion, although we skimped a little bit on the raytraced reflections for speed reasons.