One of the most visually dramatic special effects sequences that Home Run Pictures has ever been asked to create, the tornado encounter scenes for the NASA funded "Force Five" planetarium show were also one of the most technically difficult to produce. With the fulldome projection system's requirement that the scenes be totally immersive 360 degree reality... allowing the audience to look all around, front, left, right or even behind... there were few "visual effects shortcuts" available to our animators and technical directors to accomplish what producing the sequence required.

With the transition to an upgraded animation and rendering pipeline occuring at the studio, the timing was right to allow for some of the most complex and technically intensive scenes to be created. Autodesk Maya's Fluid Effects and nDynamics were employed to generate a working simulation of the twister that touches ground near a storm-chasing pair out for an afternoon ride. Employing what the visual effects industry calls a "hair" technique applied to the tornado, we were able to steer the twisting mass's shape and path for each of the scenes in the three minute sequence.

The thunderstorm clouds, the dust and debris stirred up by the twister were created in multiple layers using Maya's Fluid Effects and nParticle tools. Since we were working in the 360 degree field of view of the fulldome format, some layers could not be rendered separately for post compositing, so the expanded memory advantages of the studio's pipeline upgrade proved a welcome answer to rendering and finishing the scenes.

The final climatic scene of the twister hitting a farm house relied on multiple groups of simulated dynamic forces passing through the model that was broken up into thousands of smaller elements. Motion created by the dynamic forces was then cached as editable animation translation/rotation curves so the animators could then manually tweak the motion as desired. Other elements were painstakenly animated by hand to allow further creative control over the cloud of things flying around. More behind-the-scenes details can be seen at the Fulldome@HomeRunPictures SITE.

This visually dramatic fulldome sequence for "Force Five " initially premiered at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Burke Baker Planetarium and then was available for licensed distribution as part of the NASA Immersive Earth Project grant.