Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/639267
j a n u a r y . f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 6 c g w 3 3 large seascapes that were not caught on film, for depicting boat and whale/dolphin interaction, for underwater effects, and for augmentation, such as white water to make the sea look choppier and for expelling water through the blow hole of the whales – creatures that are also computer-generated (see "Whale of a Character," page 34). M A K I N G W A V E S Generating the various types of water was done using Side Ef- fects Soware's Houdini as well as DNeg's in-house water simu- lation solver, Dynamo. Both are so-called FLIP solvers, a hybrid between a particle-based and a volume-based fluid simulation. "We were fully aware from the start that the turnaround times for complex simulations would be a big hurdle. And final anima- tion could not be approved until we could review how the anima- tion and FX interacted with each other," says Hyde. "Even with the talented FX crew we had, the fact of the matter is these simu- lations can take many hours. It's a slow process." Of the 30-so effects artists on the feature, nearly three-quarters of them worked on the water creation. The effects leads – Robert Pearson, Chris Ung, and Menno Dijkstra – were constantly de- veloping tools and techniques through production to stream- line the sim process. "If you can save a couple of seconds per frame of simulation, on a 200-frame shot where you do the sim a number of times and then across a production with many shots, that time-savings can be substantial." The group used Sea to push the studio's Dynamo in-house solver forward with new fea- tures. "We picked a number of shots we said we would push through the soware, and it was quite successful. We would jump back to Houdini if we sensed we could get better results, and vice versa – there were certain features in Dyna- mo that were better for certain shots," says Hyde. "This gave us more than one option and the freedom to try different things." Of course, having an in-house R&D team working on a piece of soware has lots of advantages, and many of those involved changes that resulted in the important fast turnarounds. While Dynamo proved its mettle, Houdini was the main THE MOVIE CALLED FOR A RANGE OF WATER REQUIREMENTS, FROM CLOSE-UP TO WIDE SHOTS.