The Last Airbender required several lengthy computations of fluid-like effects for the water and fire scenes, which were becoming problematic for ILM as the scenes required lengthy computation and render times. Using their in-house tool called Plume, they were able to harness NVidia CUDA and GPU’s to dramatic effect.
“As with everything in high-end visual effects, iteration was essential,” said Olivier Maury, research and development engineer, ILM. “By working within an NVIDIA GPU-based framework, we saw up to eight iterations each day of complex fire, dust and air simulations. That represents speed improvements of 10-15x over CPU-based simulations. Access to CUDA and NVIDIA GPUs has entirely changed the way we approach a variety of complex visual effects challenges.”
They used a 12-machine render farm that included Quadro FX5800 cards, which was capable of the detailed simulations of Aang’s airbending against the Fire Nations abilities. The end result was near real-time interactive rates.
“Because Plume is accelerated by NVIDIA Quadro GPUs, it’s highly interactive and becomes a tool that relies more on the artist’s eye rather than their technical knowledge,” explained Craig Hammack, associate visual effects supervisor, ILM. “This means you don’t have to understand the underlying algorithms or all of the fine details of how fluid solvers work to drive the detail of a simulation.”
