Home Run Pictures has produced animation sequences for many years with Dana Berry of Skyworks Digital. For clients, like Discovery Channel, National Geographic, NASA, and Curiosity Stream, the work is always some of our most challenging. For a National Geographic Television documentary, "The Fate of the Universe," we were asked to create a visualization of a super-massive blackhole. The extreme gravity of a blackhole causes all matter surrounding the singularity to spiral towards the event horizon. To achieve a visually dramatic effect Home Run Pictures used a combination of particle systems and geometry with animated fractal-based textures of transparency and color.

The viewer initially slowly dives in towards the event horizon, first past clusters of stars in orbit around the blackhole, then into a swirling mass of dust and other star matter. The dive towards the center increases in speed as the colors change in a rainbow-like effect. The view continues in until time and space become distorted and we are captured by the darkness beyond the event horizon of the super-massive blackhole.

In another visualization, a new theory of the "end of time" predicts that as the universe continues to expand it will eventually rip itself apart... and a galaxy is ripped apart by the increase in the rate of acceleration. Technically, creating a 3D galaxy is difficult enough, but then being able to dynamically control the rip effect was an even bigger challenge.

A galaxy is made up of millions of stars with even more nebula and dust adding to the picture... and it was desired that the look of the galaxy be close in appearance to images the Hubble telescope has captured. So how do you get a photographic finished look while being able to dynamically control with simulated gravity forces all those millions of stars, nebula and dust? To accomplish this, Home Run Pictures created a spiral galaxy with thousands of "brush strokes," each positioned by hand. Each brush stroke represented a splattering of stars, or various colored nebula or dust.

Each brush stroke had its own translation, rotation and scaling pivot points... placed to allow the splattering of elements to be independantly controled. Forces were simulated as accelerating translation, rotation or scaling forces, each growing faster and faster as the effect continued. The end result was the appearance of swirling forces ripping the spiral apart, just as the theory predicts will happen billions of years from now.

As the Big Rip destroys the galaxy, individual stars explode, and a random, fractal noise is used to simulate the fabric of space itself, ripping and popping like a kettle of popcorn.

Soundtrack courtesy of Doug Maxwell / Media Right Productions