Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/65907
Simulation ■ ■ ■ ■ INDUSTRIAL LIGHT & MAGIC HELPS PETER BERG TURN A BOARD GAME INTO A SCI-FI BATTLE ON THE HIGH SEAS Images ©2012 Universal Pictures. BY BARBARA ROBERTSON received three Sci-Tech Academy Awards, and his credits include work on Terminator 2, Star Wars: Episode I, Th e Perfect Storm, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and At World's End, Iron Man, and two Harry Potter fi lms, among many others. He joined ILM in 1988. So, when he says "most complex shot," that opinion holds water. "In the past, we always saved the big shots until the end," Smythe Smythe won an Oscar for the visual eff ects in Death Becomes Her, has says, "the really, really hard shots. We knew we couldn't do 300 shots all in that category and we couldn't have the two or three smartest simu- lation experts in the studio doing all the shots. We have a lot of solid technology from the last round of shows for modeling, creating materi- als, and so forth. Water was the biggest unsolved problem—to do the simulations on the scale we needed." Speed and Reliability ILM's system has evolved from a computational fl uid dynamics solver called PhysBam, created by a group of researchers in the computer sci- ence department at Stanford University led by Ron Fedkiw. Th e studio don, though, so for that 2006 fi lm, the R&D team engineered a way to split the simulation for each frame into multiple pieces that could run on diff erent processors; that is, they parallelized the fl uid solver code to achieve high-resolution splashes in a large volume of water. Later, to create a maelstrom in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007), the engineers and technical directors manipulated the simulation grid. But even so, each fi nal high-resolution simulation could take as many as three to four days to calculate. And always, simulation experts needed to run a separate system to create splashes, spray, mist, and foam. April/May 2012 had fi rst tried the particle-level set system (which researchers at Stanford continue developing and ILM continues using) to melt liquid chrome in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) and pour a glass of wine down a skeletal pirate's throat in Pirates of the Caribbean: Th e Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). PhysBam moved into the mainstream when it poured digital water off a magical ship as it lifted from a CG lake in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005). For that fi lm, ILM bought a four-processor, 32mb workstation specifi cally to run the simulation. A single machine couldn't handle the water needed to roll the Posei- 13