Solar System 'Lives' With Prime Focus VFX

One of the world’s largest visual entertainment services groups has created around 40 minutes of original visual effects for the highly-anticipated BBC factual project, Wonders of the Solar System.
Headed by Prime Focus, the five-part series, which is presented by Professor Brian Cox, uses the latest scientific imagery and CGI to show how the laws of nature have carved natural wonders across the Solar System. Among some of these wonders are fountains of ice that erupt thousands of kilometres into space, and the mysterious liquid methane seas of Titan.
Using real images taken from space probes including the Cassini and Hubble telescopes, the London-based Broadcast VFX team at Prime Focus was tasked with taking the incredible photographs and bringing them to life. "We didn’t want to do anything that was overtly stylised, so everything we have done in terms of colour grade and level of detail is based on as much accurate picture information as possible," said Simon Clarke, Creative Director at Prime Focus.
Danielle Peck, Series Producer added: "This is a truly beautiful series and the CGI compliments the specially-shot material perfectly. So often, space-based television programmes fail to capture the magnificence and awe of space but I think the creative team at Prime Focus have done just that."
The team of 12-18 VFX artists mainly used Maya and Fusion to create the effects which included 3D models of moons and planets. Steve Waugh, Art Director and VFX Supervisor commented: "One of our biggest challenges was trying to convey a sense of the scale of the subject matter. We built our model of the solar system to scale, so all the planets and moons that you see in the show are built with complete accuracy including sizes, relative distances, rotations and orbits."
The scale is best demonstrated in the shot where we fly into Saturn’s rings which extend hundreds of thousands of kilometres out from Saturn but are only ten metres thick," added Stephen. "We also had to create an accurate surface motion to Jupiter and its Great Red Spot which required a vast amount of work as the cloud and gaseous surface is incredibly complex."
Simon Clarke described the overall process as similar to creating a 3D version of Google Earth. "You go from a wide shot of Mars right into the Grand Canyon of Mars – the Valles Marineris. Getting the scale of the shot to work from the wide to the close-up, so the viewer can see more and more detail, involved a lot of work. These shots require R&D to set up, it’s slightly more involved than taking a spherical model of a planet and adding texture to it." Simon added: "There’s more of an alignment now with broadcast and film VFX work. Lots of guys compositing these shots have also been working on big movies. There also needs a sizable technical infrastructure to have a chance of rendering anything that looks half decent."
Wonders of the Solar System begins on Sunday 7 March at 9pm on BBC Two.
(BMcN/BMcC)