Into The Cosmos

is an Audiovisual Immersive and Interactive Experience in 9k pixels

I had the chance to direct and create that immersive piece of art in Full 3D

It has been conceived in order to be projected on three 4K screens

where the audience can be immersed and surrounded by the large scale of the Cosmos

Softwares and Plugins I used

SideFx Houdini, Maxon Cinema 4D, Insydium X-Particles, Jawset TurbulenceFD

Otoy Octane Render for Cinema 4d

& Mantra Render for Houdini

Much More than Just Composited in Adobe After Effects ;-) Huge and Complex Set-Ups in AE

A bit of my process is explained at the end

Produced by Youenn Le Guen / Mardi 8
Postproduced by Nicolas Lim / Mardi 8

The Comet

Nebulas Process

Slice Rendering through Camera Clipping

Then rebuilt in AE for movement

Nebula Early Test / After Effects Recomposition / Camera Animation

Artistic Research / First Tests

Let's go deeper in my process

The technique i used can be applied from any software or plugin that allows to build Large Scale Smoke/Fire Simulation with a really really really high amount of Voxels
- Xparticles & ExplosiaFX in Cinema 4D
- Turbulence FD in Cinema 4D
- Houdini FX
etc

My process was mostly to build a big library of nebulas that i composited in 3D in AE with a really complex After effects set up but that allowed me to make my camera movements in post and not in 3D so i didn't have to Re-render the nebulas every time i needed to adjust my camera.

The process is to render the nebulas like you would make a scanner, by slicing it using the camera clipping going through the volume.
Every part of my library was rendered like that (roughly between 100 and 200 slices per parts of the nebulas)

To go more in details on my Nebulas process :

i built some Volumes like you would do some Clouds, quite basic, then i Pyro emitted them with many different set ups of external forces and post-process advanced 3D noises in order to give them different looks and especially a looooot of details.
A few frames of simulation were enough to get the looks i was looking for, but to be honest i had to set my settings in a way so i could get the look in a few frames as my computer would crash when it was reaching too many voxels. My computer was crashing, like switching off.... 😳
Every of my nebulas parts in my libraries were over the billion voxels, which is huge, the most important thing in such conditions is to get as much ram as u can, 250Gb of RAM would be a perfect configuration for such demands.

Once i was happy i sliced/rendered every simulation
Of course the lighting process before the render was really important as well.
Then i built a really complex/complete After Effects file with lots of expressions in order to automatize my process every time i was plugging a new nebula in my file. Every nebula was at least 100 files i needed to extract image by image after importing them in sequence,
Image 1 was the closest to the camera / Image 100 was the furthest / The 98 other images were disposed in between them on the Z axis.
My expressions allowed me to setup that instantly then with some sliders i was able to fine tune the distance on the Z axis between each of my images. etc etc etc etc
Compositing and Camera movement were really efficient in AE with that set up, and i could achieve the look i was looking for, but many other looks as well if i needed without having to render again from the 3D Software.

My difficulty was to build the set up in order to be used on a 9K Projected walls, so i had to go really far in resolution and especially in Voxels.