When in Dome…

We’re putting the finishing touches on converting our theater to a 4K digital fulldome system from SkySkan. As far as I know, we’re now the largest fulldome theater in the Southeast US. We’ve been waiting for this day since I started working here three years ago. And it’s been talked about for over 10 years! [more …]

Starting on our new show, we begin with our most favorite (mine anyways) portion of the production process:

Pre-Production!

With our script getting a coat of finishing wax, our characters have been essentially locked down. With no major changes to be made to them, we can begin our character sketches! The following are some examples of our [more …]

Because dome shows are mostly 3D animation, making planetarium shows is closer to creating cartoons or video games than live action films. Therefore, most of the sound effects have to be added in after the visuals are created. The arrangement and layering of these sounds is called sound design.
I was looking to get a little [more …]

The following is a wonderful source for after effects ideas, and production assets. If you’re making full dome content chances are you’re using Adobe after Effects because of its support for 4k compositing, and because its fairly easy to use. Andrew Kramer has a quirky sense of humor in all of his tutorials, but also [more …]

We just entered our first production, Earth, Moon and Sun, into the 2009 Fulldome Festival at the Zeiss Planetarium in Jena, Germany. This year, they’re allowing full length shows to be entered into the competition. Previously, the competition was limited to shorts under five minutes, just like DomeFest. I seriously doubt our show will dovetail [more …]

We’re working on an experimental short that is designed to help us break the daily grind of working strictly on planetarium shows. The short is intended to be entered at DomeFest. An interesting challenge has arisen as we try to generate a crowd that should ultimately cover the dome surface.
My number one priority was to [more …]

Our Slaves tend to rebel, and certain production tools are rendered useless. (rendered is indeed a pun)

Morehead just became an Institutional Member of IMERSA (Immersive Media Entertainment, Research, Science & Arts). Their website is in the midst of a redesign at the moment so some of the links are grayed out, but word is that there’s a new site coming down the pipe.
According to their website,  “IMERSA is an international [more …]

So we animated our character, created a cycle in the trax editor, and increased the number of times that our cycle will repeat. When we look at our trax editor, we should see something like this, where we can see the length of our original cycle, and the number of times the cycle repeats itself. [more …]

So in part one we created the walk cycle and our character set. Now it’s time to bring that cycle into the trax editor!

First we want to make sure our character set is selected. You’ll want to click and hold onto that down arrow button to the right of your timeline length numbers.

The selected character [more …]