What software was used for the effects in Interstellar?

Question

In the movie 'Interstellar' they have used pretty good real time animations with large details. I guess they may have used global illumination rendering.

There are basic software packages to make animations like Cinema4D (used in 2012), Autodesk 3ds Max, Maya and others. And renderers like V-ray or Maxwell (probably, I'm not sure used in Gravity) So my question is: which are the software packages that used in Interstellar for modelling, animating and rendering purposes?

Answer 1

If you're asking about the black hole and wormhole scenes, Kip Thorne and the others who worked on the renderings published a pair of papers on how they did it:

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar

Visualizing Interstellar's Wormhole

As mentioned in the first paper, they designed their own software called DNGR (Double Negative Gravitational Renderer):

For this, our team at Double Negative Visual Effects, in collaboration with physicist Kip Thorne, developed a code called DNGR (Double Negative Gravitational Renderer) to solve the equations for ray-bundle (light-beam) propagation through the curved spacetime of a spinning (Kerr) black hole, and to render IMAX-quality, rapidly changing images. Our ray-bundle techniques were crucial for achieving IMAX-quality smoothness without flickering; and they differ from physicists’ image-generation techniques (which generally rely on individual light rays rather than ray bundles), and also differ from techniques previously used in the film industry’s CGI community.

And on p. 3-4 they write:

A primary goal of today’s state-of-the-art, astrophysical ray-tracing codes (e.g., the Chan, Psaltis and O ̈zel’s massively parallel, GPU-based code GRay [28]) is very fast throughput, measured, e.g., in integration steps per second; the spatial smoothness of images has been only a secondary concern. For our Interstellar work, by contrast, a primary goal is smoothness of the images, so flickering is minimised when objects move rapidly across an IMAX screen; fast throughput has been only a secondary concern. With these different primary goals, in our own code, called DNGR, we have been driven to employ a different set of visualization techniques from those of the astrophysics community—techniques based on propagation of ray bundles (light beams) instead of discrete light rays, and on carefully designed spatial filtering to smooth the overlaps of neighbouring beams; see Section 2 and Appendix A.

So, you can read the rest of the paper, especially Section 2 and Appendix A, for a lot more detail on how the software worked.

If you're asking about CG in other parts of the movie, Christopher Nolan tried to use physical models rather than CG as much as possible, he even claims "we made the decision early on not to do any green screens on the film" in this video. The ships were mostly done with physical models as discussed here (though 'digital models' are also mentioned, for example in the depressurization scene with debris), and this article says the robots were physical models in most scenes, only CG when shown running. Phantom42's answer has some info on what packages they used when they did have to use CG in scenes other than the black hole and wormhole.

Answer 2

Double Negative was the primary effects house used for Interstellar.

As Richard notes, Double Negative's currently available job listings seems to indicate a fair usage of Maya as their main software package. This, alone, does not necessarily mean that they used Maya during production of Interstellar.

However, this writeup about the films nominated for the best visual effects Oscar this past year states that all of the nominees had something in common: They were all done with Autodesk Maya.

Indeed, the visual effects and animation teams on all 10 films considered for this year’s Oscar nomination, and all five that received nominations this morning, used Maya, a powerful, customizable tool that enables deeply complex processes like character animation to look seamless and realistic on the silver screen.

Maya would have likely been used for the bulk of the modeling, rigging and animation. As this Wired article mentions, a new proprietary renderer was created for the film. Based on the job listings, Nuke was likely used for compositing the effects and live footage.

Answer 3

This article states that the software used to render that the wormhole and black hole were designed in house by the lead VFX company;

"And then we – the team at Double Negative – turned that into a new piece of software. We wrote a thing called the Double Negative General Relativity Renderer. A renderer is a piece of software which takes all the mathematics from the computer and turns them into pictures on a screen."

And a 30 second look at their recruitment page would suggest that their primary focus is on Maya.