This is a storyboard of my portfolio reel titled Psycientific Beauty. It is a reel of the evolution of the Universe demonstrating how stars, galaxies, DNA, etc. formed. One of my hobbies is reading books on theoretical physics.
Shot 1: According to String Theory, hyper-dimensional membranes called “branes” collided about 15 billion years ago and the spacetime vibrations from it are what created this Universe. Originally this shot was created entirely in 3DS MAX by using a P-Array particle emitter. Then two dimensionally I used particleIllusion to generate the brane expansion in the background, the lightning of the electromagnetic force and the unraveling of the three spatial dimensions that we are familiar with in everyday life.
Shot 2: This next shot was created only with 3DS MAX and again I used the P-Array emitters. To demonstrate the still nebulous state the galaxy is in I used a combustion atmospheric effect then scaled down the Z axis so it would fit the disk of the galaxy. Now, taking a single shot of this was easy but being able to animate a camera moving through it took a little manipulation of the program. I had to almost trick it, as I usually do, because particles are not supposed to stay stationary once that have begun and expansion. I had to raise the number of frames from 900 to about 30,000 to get the effect I wanted.
Shot 3: From watching many shows on the Discovery channel and PBS I’ve learned that the Earth actually didn’t have any water on it when it formed. It was just too hot and it all evaporated. Many scientists say that it was rogue comets that were carrying water from outer, cooler regions of the solar system that sort of irrigated the water to Earth. The comet called for a geosphere with a geometric noise identifier to give it that nice rocky texture. I created the texture map by averaging three pictures I took of asphalt, a sidewalk and some dirt. The planet, only shown in the reel, is meant to be an anonymous planet but is actually a texture map of Venus obtained from a royalty free website. Water is known to be the universal solvent and without it DNA would not have been able to form which brings me to the next shot.
Shot 4: This DNA is not actually modeled after and particular species, it’s kind of imaginary. Now, no computer is infinitely fast, so it helps to know how to visually cheat. Instead of creating hundreds of DNA strands, I created 16 of them and put them all inside a geosphere, flipped the normals, and then put a raytraced material on it which is basically just a mirror. This is what creates the effect of there being seemingly infinite strands. The materials on the strands are so geometrically distorted you can’t tell that they are actually other digital art works I’ve done, all of which are included in the slideshow of the DVD portfolio.
Shot 5: This is a demonstration of the first ancient civilizations and was made pretty easily. The pyramids were made with boxes whose dimensions all differed in intervals of 10 “MAX units”. Using the actual MAX pyramid shape just didn’t look real enough for me. The dusty sand flowing over the ground is actually the fog effect from a spotlight I put horizontally across the ground. The tornadoes you see in the reel weren’t conceived until post-production.
Shot 6: This concept came from a great movie called Event Horizon. On the walls of this room are magnetic generators holding up the core. They also shoot a burst of particles called gravitons into the core which are the particles thought to be responsible for gravity. The three rings spinning around it are magnetically controlling the amount of gravity that escapes from the core. What this is useful for is actually both time travel, only to the future, and extreme space travel. Now, geometrically this was easy to create, the real trick came with the gravitons working right which really added a lot of visual life to this scene. Once again the P-Array was perfect but I had to had them being emitted from the sub-object bases of 6 cones placed outside the room to give them the correct direction of travel.
View/Purchase seamless tiling textures used for this animation on Fotolia.
