Beyond Neptune lies a ring of ice: hundreds of thousands of icy bodies, more than 4,000 dwarf planets and trillions of comets. For NASA’s New Horizons films, Pixeldust built all of it in 3D.
Pixeldust created 3D animation and graphics for films about NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, including The Year of Pluto, broadcast on NASA TV and online. At the heart of the work is the Kuiper Belt, the icy frontier beyond Neptune that New Horizons set out to explore.
The work
Pixeldust created 3D animation and graphics for films about NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, broadcast on NASA TV and online. The Year of Pluto went on to approach 1.5 million views on NASA’s YouTube channel.
Beyond Neptune, the team built a full 3D representation of the Kuiper Belt, populated with hundreds of thousands of icy bodies, more than 4,000 dwarf planets and trillions of comets. The belt is named after astronomer Gerard Kuiper, who predicted its existence long before it was proven.
Each Kuiper Belt Object got its own color, shape and surface, from egg-shaped Haumea, later found to have a ring, to red, cratered worlds tumbling through the dark.
Pixeldust also designed the films’ dateline graphics, which tracked key events in the story. In 2018 the producers came back to reuse and extend them, adding the July 14, 2015 Pluto flyby and what followed, for one last New Horizons film timed to the January 1, 2019 flyby of the Kuiper Belt Object MU69.
Stills
