Cinematics / Dir / VFX / Visualization

Visualization

When Luke and I were developing the series of events that were going to take place on the asteroid fragment, it was important for us to get an idea of the scale of things. It’s very easy to say in words that the asteroid was x kilometers/miles/rubberduckies long/wide etc, but unless you experience it somehow, it remains a thought exercise. What we needed was a way to help us visualize the things we were about to write about, and to make sure that we stayed true to physical dimensions and limitations.

With this in mind I put together a rough environment of a 3km long asteroid fragment and dropped a scale-accurate spaceship on its surface. We were then able to explore the visualization to get a human sense of scale – what you would see if you were there, walking on the surface of the asteroid.

The setup allows the player to enter the ship via an ‘airlock’ hole in the bottom, and explore the rough structure of the ship as well. We don’t get in detail about the interior of the bridge in the book, but it helps to set our viewpoint in the world.

Gravity in the simulation is also super exaggerated, so that we can actually move around and explore in a more efficient manner. The actual gravitational pull of an asteroid fragment of this size is actually under 1% of 1G – if you jumped up while on the surface, you would (assuming you didn’t jump too hard) fall back down to the ground in about nine minutes. We didn’t feel like waiting that long if we pressed the wrong key so it’s set to about 0.5G or thereabouts.

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