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Títol:
Expedition Reef: Behind the Scenes
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Descripció:
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Creating a scene like this is a huge undertaking.
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There's a lot of people involved.
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There's a lot of research that went into it.
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At the beginning, we had no idea how we would be able
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to just technically create this scene with all of this richness.
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Because it requires an incredible amount of computer power
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to create a photorealistic environment
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full of diversity and complexity.
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What we like to do here is use computer graphics
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to create environments and animals and creatures from scratch,
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from reference, and from video.
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We also use a technique called photogrammetry.
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Photogrammetry is a technique for combining still imagery
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to create either computer models,
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or create mosaics of a large area.
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Photogrammetry is hard enough,
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but to do it underwater kind of amazes me.
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We've been working with researchers
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both within and outside the academy who have gone to coral reefs
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and taken thousands of photos of various species of corals
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so that's how we've gotten a lot of the coral models
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we've been using is via photogrammetry.
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The Visualization Studio’s experience with rendering mosaics
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from a photogrammetry standpoint now, they are able to advise me
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on how to make that process more efficient,
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so that I might use it for a tool for future scientific research.
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The hardest part was just starting this incredibly huge task
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of putting down thousands and thousands of pieces of coral
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and figuring out how to make it look good.
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What you do is you take something and you replicate it many times
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and you try and change it just enough each time.
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You rotate it, you scale it, you kind of orient it different ways,
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maybe change the color a little bit,
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or kind of other subtle variations that you can do systematically.
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As far as how many individual instances of each thing are in there
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it's thousands, tens of thousands,
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more than I can keep track of.
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In addition to the corals, which are animals,
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we also created other creatures
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to draw the audience into this location.
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The scene itself is filled with something like 3,000 fish.
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We have 31 different species of fish.
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We started by looking at the fish that we have here in our tank.
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For a while, I was just going out there every morning,
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just staring at the fish and trying to learn about how they move,
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so I just sat there and tried to learn as much as I could
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about what was going on with their behavior.
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Then we began building the models for each fish.
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Meanwhile, we needed to figure out a way to get the volume of fish
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that we wanted into the scene, and we wanted quite a few.
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So, I started researching it.
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A piece of software that we use that is really good
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in simulating crowds, like large numbers of people,
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we were able to adapt that to simulate large crowds of fish.
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We move over, and we look at a really interesting relationship
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between this creature called a Crown of Thorns starfish,
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which is this really amazing starfish, that's covered in spines.
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They eat corals, so they can go through
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and kind of decimate an entire reef, if they're not held in check.
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But a little tiny crab called an Acropora crab,
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that lives inside this coral, and when one of these Crown of Thorns
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come out to, basically, attack its home, it tries to fight it off.
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I did have to do a lot of hand animation for the crab
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and Crown of Thorns battle scene,
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because the crab is grabbing onto the spikes and shaking them,
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and so that involved a lot of hands-on activity.
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We had a scientist in here just the other day.
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When she saw it, she was like,
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"Wow, how'd you do that? It looks great!"
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This whole process has been absolutely fascinating
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and so much fun for me integrating with our visualizations team.
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When they were developing a particular scene,
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they would pull me in to advise how to make that scene
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very, very scientifically accurate.
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But the level of detail that they were going for was incredible.
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It really, really challenged me to pull up some of the cutting edge,
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really up-to-date literature to try to feed them
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as much information as we know.
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That opening scene shows the risks that we took
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and that they are actually paying off with some beautiful imagery
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that the audience will be able to experience.
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We really want the audience to walk away from the show
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not just entertained but also hopefully
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they will have a greater sense of what coral reefs are about.
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Right now coral reefs around the world are being challenged
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by unprecedented stressors, mostly human-induced.
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This show instills a sense of hope.
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This is a difficult story, this is a turning point for reefs
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but it's not too late.
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We can turn this around collectively
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if we make some responsible decisions moving forward.
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♪ (music) ♪
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