For the new ‘World of Color’ show by Disney, Motion Theory got the job of creating the commercial mixing the water fountains with classic Disney characters and imagery from years gone by. They used an impressive mix of Maya, RealFlow, Houdini, AFter Effects, Nuke, and several other tools to bring it all together, and discuss the whole process in detail with FXGuide.
fxg: How did you then integrate those characters with the fluids and particles?
Cochrane: Well, firstly, our previs, which was done in Maya, actually became the layout. We used those cameras from the previs and they became our hero final cameras. So the match-moves were modeled, rigged and animated in Maya to the Maya cameras. We then got the geometry from Maya over to Houdini. Sometimes you have to scale geometry up or down when it goes into RealFlow in order to have it at the right scale for the simulation engine, so all that geometry conforming was done in Houdini. We used dozens of different techniques for each of the characters – there were between at least five to ten different fluid simulations for each. All those different fluid sims were layered on top of each other and rendered together in Houdini all at once or in groups. What you’re seeing is no single technique at a single time, it’s a real mix.
Fragomeni: There were actually over 150 simulations for this 30 second spot and I think we amassed about 12 terabytes of data.
Cochrane: And that doesn’t include revisions and techniques that we didn’t use!
