The University of Illinois is home to a number of hidden gems on the forefront of scientific discovery. The Advanced Visualization Laboratory, or AVL, part of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, is one of those gems.

This month, the AVL will be featured in the Ebertfest Film Festival for their work in the feature film, “Tree of Life.” AVL Director Donna Cox and senior research artist Robert Patterson will host the presentation “Tree of Life: Making Movies using Scientific Data” on April 28 at the Illini Union. The presentation title alone sums up what makes the AVL so special. Even though they normally specialize in visualizations for planetariums, museums or IMAX documentaries (“Tree of Life” is their first feature film), the visualizations they make aren’t just pretty pictures: They are elaborate simulations based on scientific data.

Such was the case with “Dynamic Earth,” a full-length film made for planetarium domes. The AVL partnered with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., to digitally recreate Hurricane Katrina based on data the Boulder researchers had collected. The film transports the viewer into the hurricane, traveling in toward the eye. The audience sees arrows mapping air flow and temperature changes throughout the hurricane, charting the hurricane’s evolution throughout a 36-hour period as it moves toward New Orleans.

In their IMAX movie “Hubble 3D,” AVL partnered with Johns Hopkins’ Space Telescope Science Institute, creating the amazing experience of journeying through Orion’s Nebula, dodging stars while flying toward Orion’s star nursery. Once there, among the gases, audiences can watch how stellar winds dictate the way new stars and even entire solar systems are formed.

“AVL is highly unique in that our approach is to bring science to the people through cinematic representation of scientific data,” Cox said.

But the AVL is still faced with the task of taking all this data and transforming it into the striking visualizations we see.

The first step is getting the scientific data. The data the lab primarily deals with are particle positions, photographs and volumes. Particle positions are basically 3-D data points plotted in 3-D space, used in situations similar to plotting star positions in outer space.

Photographic data is a bit trickier. Here they use real photos but take information from the photos and use it in different ways. In some cases, they sculpt a photo into a three-dimensional environment, like with Orion’s Nebula in “Hubble 3D,” or use the photos as a guide to create a new environment. In other cases, images can be broken down into smaller parts and actually pasted in 3-D space. Stuart Levy, a member of the AVL team, described it as “a mix of imagery, scientific guesswork and artistry.” The last data type is volumes, which are mathematical structures consisting of 3-D grids of information. One of these grids is called a vector field, which contains imaginary 1-unit arrows represented by x,y,z values. Usually there’s another grid that can represent other types of data, such as position, density, temperature and speed. In the Hurricane Katrina visualization, vector fields and volumes were used to create the arrows that represent air flow, direction and temperature change.

“We create our pretty CG (computer-generated) arrows by essentially dropping a bunch of massless balls into the vector field, which pushes each ball in one direction or another, and then we trace the path of the ball,” said AVL team member AJ Christensen. “The ‘path through the vector field’ is the CG arrow.”

Once the data is in hand, the boundaries of the data need to be explored. In some cases, resolution boundaries dictate how close you can get to the data. With the Katrina visualization, they dictate how close the film can get to the volumes without running into them. In the space scenes, they affect how close filmmakers can zoom in on stars and other objects without losing quality. This is also important when it comes time to determine the camera paths needed when combining the different layers of data and images.

The next step is creating the actual visualizations. The team normally uses the software Autodesk Maya, but AVL also relies on software specially created here at the University. Then comes the final task of rendering the visualizations. The way this is done depends on the visualizations’ intended output; IMAX movies are rendered differently than planetarium dome films. It requires “interdisciplinary teamwork to create these stunning visualizations,” Cox said. “We couldn’t do it without being at the University of Illinois.”

In the end, these visualizations make it further than just blockbuster hits. They provide an educational outlet through the films and documentaries they’re featured in, and they are also a great tool for scientists themselves. Not only do they allow scientists to see their data in action, like in “Dynamic Earth,” but they provide a great medium for scientists to share their data among each other. But regardless of whether they are meant for work or play, the visualizations created at AVL are brilliant all the same, bringing some much-needed science to cinema.