JUPITER – 2 shots

For an overview sequence presenting the Solar System, BUF had to make 2 shots of the Jupiter planet, seen near and inside the Great Red Spot, aka Jupiter's Eye. To build this gigantic vortex with that is the size of 3 earths, we decided to see it as canyons of clouds, almost solid at this scale. To ease the process, we chose to work with procedural modeling, and created special manipulation tools to design and animate the huge cyclonic shapes. A procedural displacement texture comes at the end to add thin details. A special shader was created to simulate the cloudy nature of the model, using translucency. Upon this model, we designed many paths flowing along the canyon walls to lead the particles of smoke.
The ground, a plain of clouds, was built using several satellite photos of Earth's cyclones in multiple transparency layers, animated in

MILKY WAY – 23 shots

BUF created a complex asset of the Milky Way that was used for numerous shots. Built from a spiral fractal tree, many layers were generated : various size of stars and star clusters, clouds and dust, pink nebulae, hot heart made of dust particles and dark tendrils based on hair shaders textured with cosmic clouds. For some shots showing a time-lapse of our galaxy during millions of years, this asset was animated with a procedural coiling that simulates the physical laws revealing the dark matter.

NEBULA – 17 shots

This category includes many different shots with various purposes : some of them are showing specific cosmic places (the Eta Carina nebula, the Crab nebula, the Emission nebula, the Rosette nebula, the Orion nebula) and others are more generic nebulae, cloudy colorful cosmic postcards. Based on astrophotography references, the challenge here was to dimentionalize and build assets in order to travel around or through the nebulae. Various approaches were used depending on the shot, from simple cards textures, smoke particles, sprites, metaballs, hair shaders, procedural shaders. We were very careful to optimize the rendering cost, specially for those using volumetric shaders. For example, the journey into the Eta Carina nebula is a 2.5 minutes shot, so a rendering cost of 10 minutes per frame will imply 23 days of computing time !

PULSAR – 2 shots

This representation of a pulsar needed some fluid simulations and a hair shader to simulate the magnetic distortions.

RADAR SIGNAL – 3 shots

This sequence illustrates how humanity is emitting radio signals through space, symbolized with bubbles that are spread out and reach the neighboring stars. We also made an hypothetical alien signal (based on strange attractor textures), that crosses the trajectory of the Earth.

STARFIELD – 6 shots

To have parallax in some starfield shots, we generated some volume filled with particle stars, paying special attention to obtain a natural distribution, and analyzing various astrophotographies to find the right density of stars and color variations.

SOLAR SYSTEM CREATION – 12 shots

The solar system genesis sequences awarded to BUF represented very challenging shots, full of gigantic events, proto planets and asteroids colliding with each other or being bombarded with comets, birth of the moon, in the cosmic landscape of the dust and smoke primordial accretion disc. A bank of generic asteroid collisions (dynamic simulations) was prepared. A special tool was written to allow us to control the density of comets' impacts on planets, with automatic reverse animation of the comet. For the time-lapse of the moon aggregation, we created a procedural reverse animation, ejecting particles from a sphere filled with debris. For the biggest collisions, we used a liquid simulation dressed with incandescent debris, that fit better with the scale.

SOTI – 14 shots

Many shots involve the Spaceship Of The Imagination because the production wanted it to be the visual signature of the Cosmos series. The reflective ship was animated flying in various environments, and when Neil was visible in the shot, we composed a CGI SOTI around the shot set. At the end of the production, the client needed to re-shoot some additional sequences for some episodes, with Neil speaking in the spaceship. The problem was that the set did not still exist at this time, several months after the end of the main shooting. We were asked to recreate in CGI the interior of SOTI and compose Neil shot on a green screen. In one of those shots, we created a complex extension set, with the camera turning around Neil, inside and outside of SOTI, in a full CGI landscape of rice paddy fields.
BUF had the chance to be in charge of two important SOTI's shots : the first apparition of the ship in a long shot, time-lapse of a sunset upon the sea finishing by its takeoff with Neil, and its last takeoff in the end of the episode 13, on the same cliff, showing the empty ship leaving the Earth.

SUN and RED GIANT – 12 shots

We created a sun asset used to illustrate various sequences of the future and past. The Sun, mapped with animated procedural textures, is dressed with the typical tendrils of ejected gas, built from hair curves. In a sequence about the end of the Sun, we animated its growth and the destruction of Mercury and Venus, using fluid simulations. We also made some shots showing a red giant star, shedding a river of incandescent gas onto its white dwarf companion.

SUPERNOVAE – 17 shots

To create the massive supernovae explosions shots, we started to study some nebulae in the final state of a gigantic fluid explosion. So we created several dynamic simulations, mixed and retimed them in order to finish in a similar shape to some nebulae references, such as the Crab Nebula. Then we made a subtle morph to mix the fluid simulation and actual photos of the nebula. Because most of the explosion shots were quite long (often more than 15 seconds), we had to choreograph various events to keep them violent, interesting and spectacular to see all throughout the shot. We used an initial flash of light, a blast, the ejection on material through space coming from fluid simulation, secondary explosions supposed to be coming from electromagnetic echos, and subtle apparition of nebula and smoke structures.

UNIVERSE and GALAXIES CLUSTER – 9 shots

This category of shots encompasses some sequences showing the Universe from a scale that reaches the limit of the visible universe.
We are beginning the shot at the scale of the Milky Way and the camera pulls back to embrace the surrounding galaxies cluster at 100000 times wider scale. All the galaxies of this cluster were built as fruits of a complex tree. Each branch of this tree is the trajectory of particles in an explosion simulation. The resulting structure of this process provides a “quasistatic” state : the set of galaxies seems to be randomly distributed in space, but a subtle dynamic structure can be perceived.
The camera continues to pull out, showing wider set of galaxies clusters to reach the limit of the visible universe, end of our cosmic address.
At this scale, we decided to represent the Universe as a fractal structure colored by the density of the galaxies. This structure was created using several layers of fractal sponge textures, and these layers were used to generate the density of galaxies.
Another challenge here was to make, in a single shot, a 3D camera journey that would cover such a huge scale change. In most of computer graphics softwares, one cannot animate a camera in a scene from 1 to 10 power 26 meters. So we had to create an exponential movement for the camera that allowed us to interlock different scenes as “Russian dolls”.
There is also one shot about the multiverse theory, showing thousands of various universes as drops of water in an huge waterfall. Procedural textures were used to generate the universes, inside reflective spheres that were animated using a liquid simulation.

VENUS – 24 shots

BUF created a complex environment of the Venus planet, from the space point of view, from the satellite altitude, at the high atmosphere level, with the tormented sea of sulfur dioxide clouds, and from the SOTI flight over the cloudy landscape until reaching the rusting decomposing hulk of the Soviet Venera 13 spacecraft.
The challenge here was to build this environment using very few reference images, as only a couple of photos were taken by the Russian satellite after its landing before dying quickly in this hellish place. So we had to match these well-known references of a ground and volcanic close up, and imagine the rest of the landscape. We built a vast smooth and volcanic surface, using various earth volcano or moon crater height maps. The biggest challenge was to make the audience feel the terrible Venusian atmosphere, made of dense carbon dioxide, with an atmospheric pressure 92 times the Earth's and temperature of at least 460 °C. So we designed various atmospheric layers (clouds, fog, sulfuric gas chimney) to reduce the visibility. To render the high pressure, we added a strong lens distortion with extreme chromatic aberrations, as if the scene was shot through the porthole of a submarine. A heat wave effect was added at the end to render this infernal climate.

VOYAGER – 5 shots

A part of the last episode is dedicated to the Voyager 1 space probe. BUF was asked to create some shots showing some of the wonders that the probe discovered on Jupiter's and Neptune's moons : volcano eruption on Io, ride in the icy canyon of Europa, flight over the Triton's surface with its nitrogen geysers.