 plantarium is, and have been to one. Ooh, a lot more than I thought. So then the first couple parts will go really quick. We're gonna tell you what a plantarium is, what we do, and how we use blender to make shows for plantariums. All right, so this is the castle plantarium where I'm from in the United States, Wyoming. Plantariums come in a bunch of different shapes and sizes where I'm from. We have a very small plantarium with a nine-meter radius dome that's really small. Most people have much larger ones. What we have is a single projector system. So we have a projector in the middle of the room and it uses a fisheye lens to project onto the dome. Other plantariums will have multiple projectors projecting on half of the dome to get more resolution. But originally what plantariums were used for, they just have a kind of a big metal ball in the middle of the room that would have pinpoints for light to make stars cast on the dome. And that's why there's a dome shape. Because it makes it, because the night sky looks kind of like a dome. And so when we're teaching astronomy about stars and constellations, it's easier if we can use a dome. But more and more, we're using plantariums for other types of science, astronomy, physics shows like that. So we'll run movies on them. But we can't run the traditional square format. So what I have here is the scene from one of our shows that we made called Exoplanets of a radio telescope. And down here, I was giving an example. So we'll have the normal like 10, 20, or a 1920 by 1080 square camera, right? So, the, oh. Oh, it's going to crash. 19,000, all right. Anyways, so we have the square movie format. You can already kind of guess since you've been to a plantarium before, if we were to project that onto the dome, it would be all warped and stretched. Wonder if we can just close this. All right. So what we have to do is, Blender comes with a nice camera. You, what's that with that? So, go to our camera, 1920 by 1080. First thing we'll do is we'll make it a square format, like 10, 24, or and 25. And then, we'll go over to the camera settings, right? With the cameras selected and we'll click Panoramic. And then for domes, I don't know what the default is, but I think it's fishite equal distance. And that produces images that look like this. So it warps what you may think of the image looking like. And on the dome, so down here, this will be what we call the horizon, all the way around. What that translates to on the dome, the bottom part of the dome all the way around. And then anything in the middle of the frame, up here, that's what we call the zenith, the very top of the dome. And so, that'll show up on the ceiling all the way straight up from the sky. And so, I guess I can show a couple of examples real quick. We have just our normal one. If we were to shoot that with a normal camera, you can kinda see how that's very strange. If you were sitting down here, let's say, you were sitting in the back row, the top of the radio telescope would be all the way behind you. And so that's why we change it to be worked like that. So then it's in front of you. And then the second part, he's gonna talk about how kind of that minor change of going from flat screen to full 360 means a lot of reworking things in Blender and also some of the other challenges that come with larger screen dimensions and computer processing and things like that. And then we'll come back and talk about what we've done in Blender for Blender. Hello, everyone. My name is Arthur Wolff. This will be also really quick here. So, Jan said something about what full dome is, but I will try to illustrate what is challenging in full dome. So part two, challenges of full dome. The first thing is that full dome is extremely expensive. Let these images be self-explanatory. I'm not going to go too much into details, but given that you probably don't want to own a planterium. So domes, standard domes, domes is something required for planterium. Certain domes are really high in diameter. In Olshten, which I worked for Olshten planterium, there's a 15-meter diameter dome. And in Kasper, like Jan said, it's like nine. Sometimes, planterium have also production domes to test something, because in planteriums, mostly shows are going constantly, there are constant screenings and you cannot test online. You don't have the main dome online all the time, so you have to test something on production dome, see what's where. And full dome projectors. This is really vital. And a setup that covers entire dome with a full dome frame can be a full dome projector. In planteriums, usually there are two or more projectors for the main dome. There's a difference between the system. In older planteriums, there are mostly single projector systems and the modern ones, there are multiple projector systems. Well, this projector probably costs more than my home. It's one of the sownest model. Another thing, what is costly in full dome is it's render from software and support expenses. So installation of a multiple projector system, a full dome system configuration. In example, aligning projectors output in the dome to create seamless hemispherical image as blending. So you have projectors that are screening parts of the image on the dome and you have to align them seamlessly so that the image is seamless, just like this. Maintenance nearly always requires professional service. There are companies all over the world which are offering the services for planteriums. Another concern in full dome is that there are human just amounts of data here. Full dome shows are usually 40, 30 minutes long, and to illustrate how huge amount of data is here, there's a, let me just read it. Most of the shows are 4K, this is the resolution. It's always squared for the fisheye equidistant lenses. For instance, there are some 2K movies which are mostly by smaller planteriums and there are only 11 8K shows available. This is information based on 18 October, but I can put today's dates and probably nothing changed. Only 11 8K shows. Because there are problems with computing full dome, a 40 minute 4K shows is 40,000 frames at 40 FPS and it's months of render time because it's 4,000 per 4,000 pixels per frame. And planteriums without proper computing power are forced to render their shows only at 2K or even one key resolution. For example, in Olshten, we were rendering our show at 4K and then quickly switched to 2K because it was impossible. I know that Jan rendered exoplanets at 2K resolution because of lack of proper computing power. Good thing to know is that flat screen creations are always superior to the full dome ones. So full dome suffers from decreased brightness, contrast, color issues and the fact that every dome projection system is different. Even aging of separate predictors brings picture quality because if one projector ages, then you'll see it's like images no longer seem less. There are two different kind of images on the dome. So every frame has to be tested on domes. Previews are necessary. So some of them will look completely different than the ones on computer screens. This is a brief explanation of what is brightness, contrast, probably all of you know what's where it is. Amount of light, it's in the context of full dome. So brightness here is amount of light produced by the projector. Contrast is a range of difference between black and white and shades of color. And these factors are factors that cannot be looked at individually because, example one, projector might be very bright, but this will often result with a relatively low contrast, as you can see. Our night sky, I'm seeing better on a computer screen, but you have some perception of it. Our night sky will, well, it's almost white. This is more popular in time times, that extremely high contrast come at the expense of brightness and color saturation. And it means that our image is so dark that you hardly see any details. Right, there's one very funny thing in full dome and this is due to characteristics of the dome. It's a light pollution in a micro scale called cross bounce. Light hitting the screen is bouncing back of it. This light is not just going into the eyes of the audience. It's going all over the room, including the opposite side of the dome. So we have the dome and the projectors produces the light and this light is not returning back to you. It's hitting the dome all the way on the room and it produces this effect and lids the light, the elements of the dome that shouldn't be lit. So it's a problem. It can be avoided by reconstructing, repainting the dome, having the dome constructed with proper material. Is it possible to do anything without the dome? You would probably answer it yourself. But I would just say that full-dome production studios including plantariums, selling shows have to make sure their testing dome and projectors are not poorly designed or configured. There was one show produced by Warsaw Plantarium Heavens Copernicus Studios. They made a dream to fly and anybody saw it. Okay. Anyway, they made the show and they had a very dark projectors, poorly designed or configured and they pumped up the brightness so much that in some plantariums it's just too shiny. And different types of content require different configuration. Brightness contrasts are very important to astronomy but explaining marine life is a different matter. Even in a plantarium, they need to keep a balance between a QLT night sky and plyback of other types of content. I think this is self-explanatory. Transitions are things that are especially challenging in full-dome because shows with fast cuts, zooms and crazy camera are impossible to watch. Most of the shows are made with a camera when we get a very slow pace. Peaceful transitions, very hard to maintain each shot interesting because the dome is so huge that for a moment it replaces reality for you and imagine that you have this image projected on a whole room so that it replaces our reality and if you have your reality beaten up with Hollywood cuts, you will vomit. Flash, should some brightness changes? Forget about it. Unless you're really experienced in full-dome, it won't work. Dome is too big like I said before, too big to change environment so quickly and don't make viewers dizzy. That's some copyright claims. That's it. And now we will move to part number three. I will show you what I did in Olsztyn, Poland and then Jan will show you what he did at Casper, Wyoming. So we opened the window to the full-dome world in Olsztyn with Blender. That's why we're here. City of Olsztyn wanted to promote Olsztyn in some more exotic way and showing a planetarium was felt like a good idea, so we did it. This is City of Olsztyn, it's a good image. And this is our planetarium in Olsztyn. The diameter of the dome is 15 meters. It's pretty huge. It has two JVC projectors, simple as that. And Blender can do that. These are frames that we made. The whole movie is a combination of real shots and we've combined 3D elements. So these are full-dome frames. It's fisheye, this is how it looks on the dome. This artifact in the center is an old-size projector that once projected monochromatic stars in the planetarium. Now full-dome is mostly used for it. Well, so this is huge. You see it and it's, wow. Oh, that's it. Hi, I'm Casper Wyoming at the Casper Planetarium where I'm from. I made the show with our team there called Exoplanets, show about exoplanets. So what I was trying to do with it, one is make a show for the planetarium about exoplanets, a show that at the time wasn't a very broad topic. There wasn't a lot of shows about exoplanets so I wanted to fill that gap in the planetarium industry. And some of our other shows we make on Adobe After Effects, but that costs money. So I was using Blender for things and I wanted to be able to make the entire show in Blender, essentially from start to finish. So model everything, render everything and then use the compositor and the video editor to put it all together. And then what I have here is the show is about 30 minutes long. So then I just took clips of that and cut it into about a three-minute section. We're not gonna watch the whole video because a lot of it is just credits just to give you an idea of what the show looked like. It's also warped. So these are the full-dome frames so you can just kind of try to imagine what it would look like on the dome. Humans have long dreamed of planets orbiting stars and systems other than ours. In 1991, astronomers Alexander Volchan and Dale Frail detected regular deviations in the radio beam from a pulsar, PSR B1257 plus 12, approximately 980 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Virgo. They determined an object orbiting the pulsar was causing the star to wobble. Therefore, slightly shortening and lengthening the times between the beacons. This radio velocity metoplar spectroscopy has been a productive method for detecting exoplanets. 51 Pegasi is much like our sun in size, temperature and luminosity. Its planet, officially named 51 Pegasi B, was also given the nickname since gravity limits the mass an animal could attain before it collapsed under its own weight. Flight would be significantly more difficult and would probably be based more on buoyancy. On Earth, birds, insects and bats flap their wings to gain lift. On Gliese 667 CC, animals would likely fly by ballooning and displacing a significant amount of air around them. From the surface of B, during closest approach, C looms menacingly large in the sky, appearing two and a half times the apparent diameter of the moon from Earth. B is then caught in a gravitational tug of war, the nearby gas giant pulling one way and the more distant star, the other. The tidal forces contort the surface. The first planet is consumed in Earthquakes and volcanism was Fomalobie, whose orbit is extremely distant. Fomalobie is a gas giant approximately twice the mass of Jupiter. It most likely is subject to an ongoing bombardment of comets and asteroids, leaving it enveloped in clouds of dust and debris. Now, sciences have discovered thousands. And that's only in our small, humble region of our moderately sized galaxy. It is an exciting time in astronomy with new discoveries constantly feeding our desire to explore. For planetarium, just switching your camera type and you guys can make them too. Free and open source, all in blender, everything you need. You can make your own planetarium shows. So I don't know how much time do we have left there. So, all right, so if we have some time left over, we were gonna talk about possible improvements for blender to make it a little bit easier to make full dome and also open it up to questions. So if anybody has any questions at any point in time, just ask them and if not, we'll keep going with this. Yep, yes. So I think, I think I understand what you're saying. So, originally, so we go over here. Through this scene, ideally what we want to best simulate and what kind of stems from what the dome was made for is just looking straight up at the night sky. But when we wanna put images on, it's easier to represent things if we tilt the camera forward instead of having it straight up. I don't know why it's thinking right now, but so when we tilt the camera forward with that fisheye, it kind of, it puts what we have, what our focus wants to be, kind of in the middle of that warped frame, but if we were to look to the dome off to the side, it starts angling things, making it kind of weird. You'll have like candlesticks or windows or something angled to the side instead of straight up and down. And that's one of the challenges with 3D domes or just domes in general. If you're not doing something that's completely space based or full sky off to the side, things can look weird. One way around this kind of is to have a tilted dome. So we can, some planetariums, and it's more and more that the dome itself will be tilted 10 to 30 degrees like that and then the chair is kind of layered. And what that does is it makes it so that the zenith isn't necessarily straight up anymore. It's more in front of you so you have more room to play with and it kind of negates those effects. So I could, I think, that's kind of what you were saying. Oh yeah, so like in Blender itself, if we were to, let's say, set this one, I think this is the dome cam, if we were to look through the camera, in Blender it just looks straight up because that's where the camera is pointing. But when it renders, it'll render the warped version. And kind of how we have to do it, our work around for being able to place camera, see if our tilt is right, see if our objects are in the field of view is we just have to go into rendered view and luckily it warps it if we go into rendered view and then we can just control our camera from a different one to see how it fixes that position of the dome. And that was actually one of the things that we were gonna talk about. There's no viewport support really. So if you want to do open GL rendering, it's not really an option for planetariums because when you look through the camera, it's just looking straight up where the camera's aiming. There's no warping of it. And so we understand that development is hard and may not necessarily be able to be done, but it could, that'd be one thing we would like. Got viewport warping things. Also it's only for cycles where you have that option to switch the camera. In blender render, some people have made different plugins, but there are some issues that come with those plugins to be able to warp the camera. And in the compositor, there's also no way to warp images that you wanna put. So if I wanted to add some image over the top of like an astronomer or something, a square image projected onto a dome as we saw warps all the edges. And so it looks funny. A way around that is to essentially mimic what the camera's doing and warp the image to fit it. But if you're adding an image in the compositor, it's a bit more tricky to warp it properly. Any other questions? Yep. What should be some of the images? So not really any mainstream things like that. There are a lot of inflatable planetariums. So small planetariums that you can inflate and they use those to bring to schools in places that won't have any. And small projectors that'll do that. But that's about as close as you can get to a individual kind of planetarium experience is some of these smaller inflatable domes. But even then, that plus the projector kind of costs a good amount of money. And because of all these costs, most planetariums are publicly funded. But what we try to do in the Catholic planetarium is we try to teach Blender to as many students as we can and give them the opportunity to make full dome content because Blender's free and open source. Anybody can just change the camera type and make a show for the planetarium. So we try to teach our kids in the community to be able to do that and either one, come work for us or two, just be able to watch something on the dome that they created. There are a way to reduce that light bounce. Yeah, kind of what he said, different types of paints on the dome can help with reducing the bounce back light. It's just a thing to be aware of when you're making a show. Sometimes if you have kind of a grassy field on one side and the sky on the other, the sky is gonna be much brighter and that'll be on the back of the dome and so that light will go in the front of the dome lighting it up. So what you can do is just post-processing, correct for those types of things. I don't know of any automatic way, but what? Yeah. Yeah, really, at least as far as I know in the industry, most people who make content for it and most people who have domes just realize that that's a thing, that's an effect that can happen in some scenes, the cross-bounds of light. And so in larger planetariums, it may not be such an issue as in smaller planetariums, but you can just edit the image in post-processing, contrasts, things like that, to try to negate that effect if it happens. So most of the time, the planetarium, we'd want things to be as accurate as possible. So actually, what we have here, the first, what I had, so that was the whole point of having the dome in the first places to have accurate positions of all the stars and be able to draw the lines is you would be able to see in the night sky. So this is actually tonight's night sky here in Amsterdam. So if there wasn't so much light pollution, you went outside, looked, let's say, south straight up, you would see Ursa Major, Draco, those kinds of constellations. So yeah, we try to make them as accurate as possible from, and that just comes from softwares where you can get images of the stars and stuff like that or softwares that'll come with the projectors that can project stars like that. Any other questions?