The Molecule has a new blog post up talking about the problems they experienced doing the 3D Modeling and simulation work for “The Detonators” on Discovery Channel. Each of the 20 simulations took multiple layers (5 to 8) plus 2D overlays, and they found alot of interesting tricks along the way.
Additionally, it is important to note that the layers were not all rendered at the same resolution–occlusion and shadow passes were amongst the slowest, and rendering them at half- or quarter-resolution would allow us to decrease the render time by a factor of 4 or 16, with no noticeable difference in final image quality.
Most of the modeling was done with Maya and the nCloth solver.
