Cloudy-Tornado_largeThe big “end scene” for Sony Imageworks’s “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” consists of a giant spaghetti tornado destroying the humble city of our heroes.  The effect was done using a tool named “SPLAT” on the new NVidia Quadro GPU’s.

The memorable ‘spaghetti tornado’ scene includes elements rendered using SPLAT, SPI’s proprietary volumetric rendering tool designed to run on the NVIDIA Quadro GPU. Atmospheric effects rendered in SPLAT not only included dust clouds, fire and sparks, but also—for the very first time—tomato sauce.

“For visual effects artists to be most effective using computer animation tools, it’s all about the speed and especially the user experience,” explained Rob Bredow, CTO, Sony Pictures Imageworks. “When an artist can do 10 times as many iterations of an effect in the same amount of time, the quality of the end product will be that much better.”

They also claim that scenes previously requiring 45 minutes to render can now be done in a mere 20 seconds!

via Sony Pictures Imageworks Creates Tornado Out Of Spaghetti Sauce With The Help Of NVIDIA Technology.