Discovery Channel Ident

"We knew going into this project that the technical challenges would be immense. Especially for a television promo, this level of 3D is quite unheard of. Mark and Lauren were our first and right choice to provide our in-house artists with the high level ocean simulations that were necessary, they worked with us very closely all the way through the rendering and compositing process to ensure that the look was being realized correctly. Mark's high-level technical background proved to be the magic bullet needed to get this project done, delivering the feature quality we needed." Dan Schmidt, VFX Supervisor, Engine Room VFX

Working with Engine Room VFX in Hollywood, Fusion Studios provided 3D fluid assets for a large stormy ocean surface for the Discovery Channel Ident for a new season of the Emmy Award-winning series, Deadliest Catch. Engine Room VFX handled logo design, solid geometry and camera animation, texturing, lighting and rendering while Fusion focused on creating the voluminous fluid elements for all aspects at and above the ocean surface.

The two studios exchanged Maya scene assets on a near daily basis, with Engine Room interfacing with the director and making revisions to the animation, while Fusion created iterations of ocean surface, surface foam, cresting waves, logo splashes, spray and mist elements and delivered these to Engine Room for rendering. With the full set of 3D assets in their possession, Engine Room had maximum capability for creative changes to camera, shading and lighting.

The piece required Fusion to redevelop a variety of their ocean tools to give the surface greater integrity for the close-up viewpoints, to make major elements of the wave-field directable, to make a more dynamic and faster-simulating surface foam layer, and fuller cresting waves.

Check out the press section to see coverage in Entertainment Engineering magazine and VFXTalk.com.

Music by: Michael Richard Plowman

Grand Staircase

William H. Powell
Oil on canvas, 12' x 18'
Commissioned 1847; purchased 1855
Rotunda

William H. Powell was the last artist to be commissioned by the Congress for a painting in the Rotunda. His dramatic and brilliantly colored canvas shows Spanish conqueror and explorer Hernando DeSoto, riding a white horse, the first European to view the Mississippi River, in 1541. As De Soto and his troops approach, the Native Americans in front of their tepees watch, and a chief holds out a peace pipe. In the foreground is a jumble of weapons and soldiers, suggesting the attack they had suffered shortly before. To the right, a monk prays as a crucifix is set in the ground.

Powell (1823–1879) was born in New York and raised in Ohio. He studied art in Italy and worked on the painting in Paris. He also painted The Battle of Lake Erie, which hangs in the east Senate Grand Staircase in the Capitol.

The Space Shuttle Discovery

Although they were keeping a cautious eye on Hurricane Dennis as it moved through the Caribbean, NASA flight operations officials decided to leave the Space Shuttle Discovery on its launch pad at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 8, 2005, in anticipation of the scheduled launch—July 13, weather permitting. Cape Canaveral is roughly in the middle of Florida’s eastern coastline, just over 75 kilometers (about 50 miles) east of Orlando, and the forecasted path for Dennis as of July 8 called for the storm to swing wide of eastern Florida and head toward the Gulf of Mexico.

This image from the Ikonos satellite shows Discovery on launch pad 39B on April 8, 2005. The tip of the bright orange external fuel tank is clearly visible, with the white, solid rocket booster snug up next to it. The orbiter itself is “in front of” (to the left in the image) the booster and fuel tank, but it is almost completely hidden by the support scaffolding, which swings away from the spacecraft before the final countdown to launch. Only the tip of the shuttle’s right wing is visible; it sticks out as a slim white triangle between the gray scaffolding and the rocket booster. (The ground-based photo provided in the link above shows the shuttle with the support structure in an open position.)

The shuttle was on the launch pad on April 7, but engineers decided to roll Discovery back to the Vehicle Assembly Building in order to replace the external fuel tank. The shuttle returned to its familiar spot on launch pad 39B on June 15, and has been undergoing its final checkups. Launch is scheduled for 3:51 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Wednesday, July 13.