Dan Brown & Ron Howard’s “Angels & Demons” opened this weekend, (Not a bad movie, if you haven’t seen it yet) and one of the focuses of the movie is the creation of “Antimatter” from the CERN Large Hadron Collider. At the beginning of the movie there’s an impressive sequence where the LHC is activated, and it turns out most of that scene was created by folks at MPC.
One of MPC’s larger focuses was the ‘Birth of Antimatter’ sequence set in the CERN facility in Switzerland. The 40 second shot describes the creation and storage of antimatter by travelling through the inner workings of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and Atlas Detector. (…) The middle section of the sequence was entirely a CG creation. The interior of the facility including the outer parts of the Atlas, were built based on photographs taken by Stammers, using image modelling and camera projection techniques. To re-create the X-Ray look of the interior of the Atlas detector, MPC was provided with a complex CAD model from CERN, and Kevin Hahn adapted this so he could develop the look in Renderman. Sections of internal pipes for which MPC had no access to they used reference photos sourced from the internet to construct CG sections to join the multiple environments. Particle collisions and antimatter FX were provided fx animators Matthieu Chardonnet and Xavier Lestourneaud and all layers were composited by Scott Taylor.
via MPC completes 170 shots for Angels & Demons | The Briefing Room.
