Newton's Cannon

Jason Fletcher of the Hayden in Boston has started a great new blog of production techniques at thefulldomeblog.com So far it tends towards the advanced end of the scale, but very worth a look for any skill level. (Meanwhile, I’ll likely be sticking to more of the budget / beginner side of things!)

Just out of discussions at IMERSA 2013*, Jason Fletcher of the Charles Hayden Planetarium has started up a new mailing list called FAR – the Fulldome Animators Resource. It’s for the express purpose of sharing techniques amongst fulldome animators. Sign up here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/fulldomeanimators

*Wish I could have gone to IMERSA this year. Sounds like it was a great conference. As it was, I was on deadline finishing up my own production work!

Need a high resolution, equirectangular projections of a celestial sphere full of stars?  NASA GSFC has ’em – plus constellation stick figures, IAU boundaries, and a celestial coordinate grid.

Tip of the hat to Kevin Scott at E&S who posted this on the Fulldome email list.

cgskies.com boasts over 300 panoramic high dynamic range (HDR) sky scenes. Most of these are, naturally, daytime or sunset scenes, and have resolutions up to 15k pixels wide. I haven’t tried them out in our dome, but they look promising for use in fulldome!

Also check out their resources page for tutorials and links to software to convert cylindrical equirectangular panoramas to other projections.

Make sure to look over their terms of use before purchasing images for use in your productions. (Not that there’s anything there that should be a concern; it’s just always a good habit.)