Issue link: https://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 5 dural water surfaces rather than dynamically simulating them, and Artist Geoffrey Coppin matched the look to the various sea conditions caught on film for animation timing," Hyde says. "So when the whale comes up to breathe or the boat dips a certain way, we used these surfaces for pumping the waves into our dynamic water surface simulation." Once timing was worked out on the procedural surfaces at this postvisualization stage, the team ran a low-level simulation, using this procedural surface to pump in the wave velocities, to get the same type of waves flowing through the simulation dynamically. If all behaved accordingly and the broad movement was approved, the effects artists kicked off a high-resolution simulation. De- pending on the size of the area, the simulation could take a few days to calculate and generate a couple of terabytes of data. "The turnaround times were quite lengthy when we got into the high-quality simulation settings," says Hyde. Next, the effects artists used that dynamic patch of water the whale or boat would interact with, and they would add it back into the original procedural surface. As a result, the dynamic simulation would only be simu- caustics generated with water simulations, we needed to develop a multi-layered caustic projection setup because we wanted art to direct the look of the caustics depending on the shot feedback, as opposed to using a totally physically correct approach," Helsdon says. According to Robyn Luckham, animation supervisor at DNeg, achieving the correct buoyancy and scale of the whales in anima- tion was very difficult, as it had such a major effect on the water simulations. "The speed of a tail slap, for example, could create supersonic drops of water," he says. To keep this in check, Luckham had to maintain a delicate balance between the emotional intent of the shot and the technical constraints. Of course, each department faced their own white whale, so to speak. For animation, it was creating realistic behavior for the mas- sive sizes of the underwater and surface pods, which were undoc- umented. For lighting, it was the close-ups of the huge whale. For effects, it was getting the detail and scale into the water simulations. The work on Sea was indeed a large undertaking, requiring a team effort among departments. This was especially important due to the tight integration of the sims with modeling, animation, and more. "Working with David Hyde, effects supervisor on the film, the VFX artists created height wedges with low-resolution water simulations, which could be fed back to the animators," says Luckham. "This helped us select the right balance of being able to see the whales and the realism of their movement before committing to a simula- tion that could take several days to solve." And in the end, it was all about the realism in this movie. Aer all, In the Heart of the Sea is a real story, about a real event, a real creature, and a real struggle for survival. So re-creating that realism was paramount. "For [the great whale], it was about him being a character, not a monster. So we had a lot of discussions about how best to portray that with the limited options we had. Aer all, whales cannot smile," says Helsdon. Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of Computer Graphics World.