Home Run Pictures worked with Buhl Planetarium at Carnegie Science Center to create a 10 minute fulldome planetarium program called "Solar Quest." The program would hilight the NASA Solar Dynamics Laboratory (SDO) spacecraft's amazing imagery of the Sun's surface, but the fulldome show also needed to create an immersive look at the inner workings of our solar system's star. The script called for a section where the creation of a star, in this case our Sun, was described. That requirement would demand we dive into a view at the atomic level showing hydrogen and helium atoms colliding in fusion fashion and releasing large amounts of energy that power a star.

The script called for a dive down to the atomic level, but since a fulldome scene is immersive, the desire was to surround the viewer so you would feel as though you were inside the action. The task would require the animation of hundreds of atoms, their orbiting electrons and depict collisions releasing energy. Seventeen year old summer intern, Warren Casey, a future computer programer, was tasked to animate the scene's atomic level sequence. He used Maya's MEL coding language to generate the hundrds of atoms and their orbiting electrons. Particle emitters were scripted to generate those atoms and the resulting release of energy from the fusion reactions.

Along with the particle scripts, Maya FluidEfx was employed to generate the hot fusion environment and resulting photon ride from the Sun's core out to the surface where a massive fluid simulation would show the Sun in a dramatic view that needed to be as realistic looking as the actual imagery being captured by NASA's SDO cameras.

The atomic portion of the sequence was so complex that the actual rendering of the final 4K imagery would tax the studio's render farm... the final frames were eventually rendered as multiple layers because of the large amounts of computer memery, RAM, needed for the calculations.