Project Hail Mary #SIGG26 ILM Stars: Used the biggest, newest data set for Sky and Star maps for backgrounds. Once identifying the brightest stars from an earlier set, made a full map. The earth-centric dataset were reprojected for new stellar coordinate views as the story required. Had to do all the work in full 32 bit float to maintain brightness. Known dust clouds in space modify the intensity of stars and needed accounting for in the result. Color of stars was generated by associating the measured temperature of stars and light spectrum temperature. There were no dust clouds rendered to occlude, but the intensity of the billions of stars calculated, their measured dimness from the dust, created the negative space of the dust across the galaxy plane. When the presenter brought up the intensity of their 32 bit render and the density of stars and nebulae in the sky is about 85 percent of constant white! The sky is not black at all. Travel through space in Star Trek style is shown using actual stars through parallax. Very impressive!! “Did you see how he glossed over his background — nuclear fusion research? I went to film school!” (Polite applause) Assets: Rocky’s ship. Made of xenonite in the story. Due to the specular properties of the material, looked entirely different dependent on lighting. Hail Mary craft. Treated as a set of 11 sub-assets. Individual components could be updated as needed. Could turn off unseen nested components. Based mostly on NASA reference. When looking at planet renders, @philiplord often made the joke “that’s no moon.” Rendered in Katana for final pixels. Ray trace bounce were at about 5 to be happy with result. There were hundreds of billions of texture lookup calls to do this. So to optimize, as the number of bounces increased, the number of textures required were dialed down. Astrophage: Greig Fraser did a tight shot of infrared lights on set and building a very dirty frame for ILM to match. Experimenting with Houdini particles, adding and subtracting per shot took too long. So a Nuke particle system was used instead so changes were more immediate. The refractive flares were also simulated in Nuke with a simple fluid system — matching Fraser’s water tables. A full set of 164 convolve kernels were built to create the swirly bokeh flares. Character name is Grace. Hail Mary. Full of Grace. Hmm. Planet Adrian: A fully rendered vortex volumetric planet was simulated for Planet Adrian. Everything was at real-world scale. This introduces precision error - affecting beam sessions with Fraser. The Hail Marybwas kept static and the planet rotated for setup efficiency. Built several cloud libraries, rendered through KARMA and laid out in Houdini. Google: iLM (Industrial Light & Magic) and SideFX's Karma renderer are deeply intertwined in high-end VFX workflows. The volumetric renders are stunning!! Scenes were first rendered in earth centric colors to verify the optics looked right, and then shifted to the lighting and colors of Planet Adrian. “I got two minutes left (for presentation). Please don’t play the JAWS theme.” HELIOS: Helios live action virtual stage system. Gaussian splats used for astrophage for simplicity. Allowed Greig Fraser to create his version of the shot. Real-time auroras built with a colored texture projected through a haze volume. Real time system good for building editorial temps.