Visualization of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 Impacting Jupiter Dave Jerrard 2011-08-04 | From the National Geographic show, "Hubble's Amazing Universe", this sequence depicts the approach, breakup and impact of pieces of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, as it might have appeared close to Jupiter in 1994. Jupiter was pelted by fragments for a period of about eight days, several of which left large dark earth-sized scars in its cloud tops that were visible for several months.A few "artistic licenses" were taken on this, on the insistence of the director. The actual impacts happened on the night side of Jupiter, about 20 minutes or so before sunrise. Here, they happen just at sunrise, so you can actually see something other than a big flash. Other than that, the approach direction is as accurate as I could get.The expanding dome is actually based on the work of Don Davis, who has done several asteroid collision paintings in the past, based on the actual science, as well as a lot of amazing space work, including the first Mars globe.An earlier version of this was approved, after four weeks of work, and then some scientists at Sandia Labs pointed out a few things that were wrong, and this corrected version was re-approved two weeks later.There is no sound on this. There was narration and a few sound effects on the show, but this is the straight animation, as it was rendered, straight out of LightWave 3D, version 9.2. It's presented here, intentionally without sound, since this would be more scientifically accurate, something I strive for in this kind of work.
A Flockload of Parrots Dave Jerrard 2015-01-19 | Several hundred parrots visited Burbank again this year, during the second week of January. Every day, at about 9:30 am and again at around 4:30 pm, they would fly by, occasionally hanging out in the tree across the street. They're loud, and they're fast. This is some video I got of them as they started combining flocks before flying away for the day.
Text In Modeler 11.5 Dave Jerrard 2013-11-01 | Trying to get some titles done in LightWave. Should be easy, right? Nope.First hurdle: Can't load the font that's needed. The Text tool is only about twenty years old now, added when Postscript Type 2 fonts were all the rage. Then along came TrueType, and since then a few others. I couldn't find the font I needed. Nor could I find any options for italics, weights, or styles. Well, um, NOTEPAD has better font support. So, to get the font I needed, I had to type everything out in Photoshop. Then create a path from that text. Save that path, then export that as an Adobe Illustrator file. Then import that into Modeler, and since that came in as only an outline (or, in the case of a spline, something useless, and I tried every import mode, so don't go saying I don't know how to use it), I had to drill that onto a polygon to create faces that I could work with.And no, the troubles didn't end there.Forgive the shakiness in some spots. My arm was getting a bit sore, and I've had no luck with screen capture software since I switch between computers a lot, and one doesn't have audio.Did I mentioned this font support has been around for about twenty years?
The A Hole Dave Jerrard 2013-11-01 | Now that I finally got my text into Modeler, I want to add a nice round bevel to the edges. There's a few bevel tools out of the box, but only one does a nice rounded bevel on selected edges: Rounder.It's flaky as hell, but when it works, it works great. Now if its insistence on rounding edges that aren't selected could be fix, and the pinching problem, which I show here, things would be great.First thing I need to do is move a few edges to avoid that pinching problem. Simple again, right?Nope. I find I need to use a combination of Merge Polygons and Dissolve to get the results I want. As you can see in the first bit, to move a seam, I have to split the letter somewhere else. Then I try to dissolve the edge, Doesn't always work, and the edge that I selected to dissolve is the one that remains. Pretty much exactly the opposite of what I want. So I end up splitting the letter a couple times in different spot and then force Modeler to merge the two polygons at the seam, and then merge the last polygon. I have to do this with a LOT of letters.But if Rounder would just work like the other bevel tools and not pinch or work on edges I didn't select, a large part of my day would not have been spent fixing letters to avoid the problem. I'm just glad not all the letters had this problem. It was just the A, a, b, d, g, p, and the ampersand, &.
Jousting at the 2013 Renaissance Pleasure Faire Dave Jerrard 2013-05-24 | Taken with the Fujifilm Finepix W3 3D camera.
Twinkling Effect With A Longer Lens Dave Jerrard 2012-08-26 | Longer lens with a completely different arrangement of lens elements and coatings. No Image Stabilization this time. You can still see some off-axis reflections, but they don't wander. Also present are some off-screen streaks and some interference patterns.
Zooming In & Out of Off-Axis Reflections Dave Jerrard 2012-08-26 | The effects of changing the zoom amount on internal reflections.
Severe Off-Axis Reflections Dave Jerrard 2012-08-26 | A more severe example of how Image Stabilization can create off-axis reflections. Now with added zoom.
Element Twinking Effect 2 Dave Jerrard 2012-08-26 | A better example of how the various internal reflections fade at different times when the light source exits the frame. This time I didn't have Image Stabilization turned on.
Changing Lens Reflections By Zooming Dave Jerrard 2012-08-26 | The effects changing the zoom on the lens has on the internal reflections. Got a few nice rainbow streaks in this as well.
Off-Axis Reflections and Dust Flares Dave Jerrard 2012-08-26 | Time to clean this lens. This shows several large off-axis reflections again, as well as a lot of dust reflections, caused by dust on the lens casting a lot of forward-scattered light into the lens, so they act light small point-light sources, with their own reflections everywhere in the field of view.Got a bit of dust on the sensor too, causing the large dark spots. Time to clean that as well.
Diagonal Off-Screen Streak Dave Jerrard 2012-08-26 | As the sun exits the frame, its light hits the side of the lens housing and sensor, causing a bright flare in the upper right corner of the frame, that nearly fills the frame.
Element Twinkling Effect Dave Jerrard 2012-08-26 | This is an example of how various lens elements will start or stop reflecting bright light sources before others, based on their position within the lens housing. As the camera turns and the sun exits the frame, certain lens reflections 'turn off' before others, resulting in a twinkling effect.
Off-Axis Lens Reflections Dave Jerrard 2012-08-26 | An example of off-axis internal reflections caused in a lens with Optical Image Stabilization. Optical IS changes the angle of one or more lens elements to keep the image stable, and this results in reflections cast by those elements to shift around, independent of other reflections.
Dogfights CLip - OKeefe sequence Dave Jerrard 2012-03-10 | A few shots I did for Episode 31 of Dogfights. Posted here for examples of volumetric cloud solutions.
Animated refraction in a glass marble Dave Jerrard 2011-10-15 | I've wanted to do this for about two decades, and finally got around to doing a good version.This is a glass marble, with four colored glass swirls inside it, with refraction indexes of 1.35, 1.41, 1.42 and 1.43. The transparent outer glass here ramps up from an index of negative 2 all the way up to positive 2.Normally, only values of 1 or higher have any meaning, but values between 0 and 1 make sense when you consider that these are what you'd get if your started out with a higher initial value, like say, your were under water. In this case, a bubble, of air, which would normally be an index of ~1.0001 would be inverted. That is, it would be 1/IOR, which in this case would be 1/1.3333 = 0.75. The result is the same as you get if you had the spherre set to 1 and have a plane in front of the camera that had a value of 1.3333. If you have some 3D software, you can try this yourself.Negative values get interesting. These don't normally make any sense either, but they are exhibited in materials called meta-materials. Basically, instead of the rays bending slightly when they hit the surface, they're bent significantly backward, almost as if there was a mirror intersecting the surface nearly perpendicularly. In these situations, you can see the back side of an object that's inside such a material. Negative values between -1 and 0 are weird, and result in a virtually completely reflective surface.At specific values, the surface appears to jump from one appearance to another, looking like I edited different sequences together. These jumps occur when the IOR hits -1, and 0.It's also interesting to note that as the IOR values get further from 0 in either direction, the render times get longer. At full 1920x1080, the render times here ranged from ~2 hours down to about 4 minutes when the IOR was near 0.This was rendered in LightWave 9.6. The caustics were done entirely through Monte Carlo radiosity, using an HDR image as the only light source.
Prehistoric Gamma Ray Burst Dave Jerrard 2011-08-08 | Current theories suggest that a gamma ray burst (GRB) caused the first mass extinction on Earth, about 450 million years ago. This sequence depicts a red giant star, approximately 6000 light years from Earth, exploding in a supernova explosion. High energy gamma rays are emitting from the poles of the star, slightly in advance of the explosion, and travel in a beam across space. We follow the gamma rays as they travel through space and overtake the camera. At near light speeds, everything would appear warped and in front of you, with objects directly in front being blue-shifted and objects behind being red-shifted. In this, objects behind the camera are seen along the edge of the frame. Finally, the GRB hits the solar system, passing Jupiter and then on to the Ordovician period Earth, ionizing the atmosphere and destroying the young ozone layer. Global auroras are shown to depict this, but in reality, the event would likely be invisible in daylight, other than the sudden appearance of an extremely bright star. The Gamma Ray Burst itself would only last a few seconds to a couple minutes at most, but the supernova would be visible for several days or months, even in broad daylight. In fact, at only 6000 light years away, it would be brighter than the full moon, and possibly painful to look at. The ozone layer would quickly be destroyed, turning into nitrous oxide, more commonly known as smog, which then kicked off a global warming period. Weather patterns changed, creating super hurricanes and eventually the planet's first ice age. The show got a major detail wrong, saying that only a couple GRBs have hit the earth. In fact, an average of 2 of these are detected by satellites every DAY. All of them are from very distant galaxies, where they pose no threat to us. And those are only the ones that we can see since only about 10% of the stars out there have one of their poles pointed in our general direction. This was done for the first episode of Radical 3D's miniseries, "Animal Armageddon" on Animal Planet.
Bellerophon Sequence Dave Jerrard 2011-08-06 | Bellerophon is the name given to the first extrasolar planet discovered. It's a hot Jupiter - a gas giant, larger than Jupiter, but very close to its parent star, about 5% the dist that Mercury is from our sun. It's so hot the atmosphere would glow red on the night side and rain would consist of molten iron. It was discovered using the Doppler method, where the light from the star when analyzed through a spectrometer, reveals that the star wobbles, due to a large mass tugging on it as it orbits the star. These are a few sequences I animated & rendered for the Nation Geographic show, "Alien Earths"
Proto-planet Dave Jerrard 2011-08-06 | A planet freshly formed in the early solar system. Rendered entirely in LightWave 9.2
Rubiks Cube Dave Jerrard 2011-08-06 | I did this several years ago in LightWave 9.2 after seeing several questions about how to do one in LightWave, and the very complicated responses that were generated. I came up with this animation in 20 minutes, which included the modeling & surfacing of the cube. Rendering took a few hours.
Dogfights Jets Dave Jerrard 2011-08-05 | A selection of fighter jet sequences that I did for Dogfights on the History Channel. All rendered in LightWave 9.6.
Kepler Launch Sequence Dave Jerrard 2011-08-05 | A series of shots I did that appear on the NASA website here: http://kepler.nasa.gov/multimedia/AnimationsandMore/animations/keplerlaunchanimations The launch plume itself was created & animated by Josh Brown.
LightWave Rocks Dave Jerrard 2011-08-05 | This was done in LightWave 9.2, and uses a bunch of new features at the time. Three are 5 different animations in this, each of the same scene, but with different cameras. The scene itself consists of 250,000 self-shadowing, randomly rotating, HyperVoxel rocks, which until this version, was not possible in LightWave. The first part is a simple Perspective camera, rendering the rocks, or asteroids, as they fly past the camera. The second clip is the same thing, but this time, the camera is a spherical one, rendering a full 360 degree field of view, much like a light probe image.. The sun, seen in the upper left, is actually 45 degrees behind the camera. Where the rocks stretch into a circular arc is exactly behind the camera. The third part is using a panoramic camera, which renders the scene in a lat-long method, which is suitable for using as a spherical mapped background. The aspect for this one was 2:1, and scaled to fit into this video, which is why there's a white bard at the bottom. Objects that are immediately behind the camera appear at the sides of the frame here. The fourth part is an orthographic render of the same scene again, meaning there is no perspective applied to the scene. The camera's film plane starts out small and grows over time, so the rocks appear large at first and then shrink. The film plane is actually inside the cloud of rocks and as some rocks pass through it on the way behind the camera, they appear to vanish. The last part is just a simple joyride through the asteroids, just for fun.
Hypothetical Asteroid Impact 20 Miles Off The Shore Of New York Dave Jerrard 2011-08-04 | This series depicts a hypothetical 6-mile diameter asteroid impacting Earth 20 miles off the coast of New York, starting out in the asteroid belt, where a larger asteroid is bumped out of its orbit by a smaller impactor. Over time, this asteroid eventually crosses paths with Earth.The impact completely wipes out most of New York, and leaves the majority of the east coast in flames. An initial dome-shaped shock wave propagates outward from the impact, flattening everything in its path. Debris from the impact is scattered into the upper atmosphere & beyond, some of it achieving a temporary earth orbit. Over time, some of that material forms rings around the earth which would gradually vanish as that material either falls back and burns up in the atmosphere as shooting stars, or travels further out into a space, leaving Earth.This was created at Radical 3D for the Animal Planet miniseries, "Animal Armageddon".
Super hurricane over Earth during the Ordovician Period Dave Jerrard 2011-08-04 | An orbital view of a super hurricane that could have been triggered by a gamma ray burst over 400 million years ago.First it destroys the ozone layer, turning nitrogen into nitric oxide, which destroys ozone and create nitrogen dioxide, which reacts with oxygen to create more nitric oxide in the process... Within days, half the ozone would be destroyed. This lets UV radiation enter the lower atmosphere, where it causes other reactions, resulting in less heat being trapped in the atmosphere. Areas of the surface start to cool, causing large temperature differentials, which would cause huge storms & hurricanes. Eventually an ice age occurred (unlikely caused by the gamma ray burst, but by plate tectonics), which effectively ended the Ordovician period.
Burbanks 100th Anniversary Fireworks Display Dave Jerrard 2011-07-14 | Fireworks over downtown Burbank on July 8th, 2011. This was shot from the top of the parking building on the north side of E Orange Grove, one block west of the fireworks launch area on the parking bridge over that same street. This video was filmed using a Canon 5D MkII with a Canon 28-135mm zoom lens. The exposure was set to automatic, but next time I'll definitely use a manual setting to decrease the video noise. The resulting 1920x1080 Quicktime file was just over 3.6 GB in size, for just over 12 minutes of video. To upload it to YouTube, which has a 2GB limit, I had to re-encode it to 1280x720 and increase the compression. The upload time for this was about ten hours. I know this because I had to do it several times thanks to Google's takeover of YouTube screwing up my YouTube accounts.
Demo Reel - 2006 Dave Jerrard 2011-07-11 | My demo reel from Jan 2006. One of these days I'll update with some of the over 2 hours of animation I've done since then. Most of this was done with LightWave 3D.
