Scientifically accurate space CGI by Pixeldust for PBS NOVA’s Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science, created with physicist Alan Lightman.
How do you show the birth of a star, or the moment a galaxy takes shape, when no camera has ever seen it? For Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science, a three-hour PBS NOVA program, Pixeldust created a series of space CGI sequences that illustrate complex cosmic phenomena, from the formation of stars and our galaxy to unimaginably powerful explosions and the curious phenomenon known as galactic fountains.
To keep every frame scientifically accurate, Pixeldust worked in close collaboration with renowned American physicist Alan Lightman and director Geoffrey Haines-Stiles, drawing on more than a decade of experience producing realistic space animation.
Imagining the unimaginable
For the star formation sequence, Pixeldust’s CG Supervisor took on a hard visual problem: showing thick gaseous regions inside galaxies collapsing under their own weight until they become dense and hot enough to ignite nuclear reactions. Careful attention to detail and precise control over the motion of every particle produced photoreal 3D renders of gas turning into stars.
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory captured an iconic image of Cassiopeia A, the remnant of a supernova, with each color marking a different element spewed through space. Pixeldust turned those still images into a realistic animation that re-enacts the explosion in all its glory, with a heightened sense of drama while staying true to NASA’s original capture.
One of the program’s most curious subjects was the galactic fountain, gas thrown out of a galaxy’s disk that rises and rains back down. Pixeldust visualized it as a sweeping, luminous flow, giving viewers an intuitive picture of a process that plays out over unimaginable scales.
The series also needed the violent side of the cosmos. Pixeldust animated a red giant in its final stages from two angles, giving the program the scale and power of a dying star while keeping every detail grounded in the science.
Pixeldust also visualized the formation of our own galaxy and solar system, from the sweep of the Milky Way to planets assembling around a young Sun, so viewers could see where we come from on the largest scale there is.
Accuracy demanded the industry’s best simulation tools. To engineer the behavior of gas at an enormous scale, Pixeldust developed VFX tools in Houdini, which offered precise control over particles rendered as gas and handled huge particle simulations. For rendering, the team built a pipeline that piped the Houdini particle data into Unreal Engine for fast, photoreal real-time rendering of animation this complex.
Stills
