Pacific Visions Film
Working on the film, Pacific Visions, for the Aquarium of the Pacific was not only challenging content to create, but pushed the limits as far as scale. This film is 9K and is incorporated into a 4D theater. The main screen is 32 feet tall and 130 feet wide with a 180 degree curvature. One of my initial tasks was mocking the theater up in order to get a better idea of how the curve would affect our content. I used blue prints to create the screens within Cinema 4D.
The overall concept of the film is building a sustainable future. My team worked on creating a futuristic city to represent that future. We used pre made models and modified them to create our vision of a sustainable future. I was given a model of a building that I needed to modify in order to make a vertical farm. Growing up, you always try to picture what you think the future will look like and this project allowed me to create those ideas which was very cool. I started by altering the glass structure and retexturing all materials. I also modeled the shelving structures to hold the plants for the interior farm. A major challenge was populating eight buildings full of various plants. I first tried using a cloner which ended up being problematic when using a render farm. Working with render instances proved to be more successful.
Rendering a film at 9K required some research on where we could render our frames. We were initially exporting EXR files with an EXR multipass and were getting errors when trying to run it on a render farm. The size of the frame with the size of an EXR file were pushing the limits of each farm we tried. My coworker and I ran some tests on exporting PNG files and started to get better results.
While the farm (Pixel Plow) was pumping out frames, we began compositing. Most of the shots have water which involved creating massive water plates. I worked compositing ocean water and waves to immerse the city renders into the scene. The final step was incorporating people, cars, and trains into our city to really bring it to life.
This project was very fun in the aspect that we were visualizing what our future could look like; however, it took a lot of trial and error to figure out how to operate at this scale.
Opening: May 2019
Location: Aquarium of the Pacific- Long Beach, California
My Contribution: 3D modeling, 3D animation, compositing, render farm setup, texturing (Arnold)
Programs Used: Cinema 4D (Arnold), After Effects, Photoshop
