VizWorld.com

The new SeaWorld commercial shows the work of Fusion CI and NTropic as the fourth wall is torn down in a swirl of turbulent fluid physics created with Fusion’s Krakatoa Particle Physics product.

The challenges in the SeaWorld spot’s production were intense. Shares Mark Stasiuk, Fusion’s Co-Founder and VFX Supervisor, “We had the huge task of doing a significant number of elaborate fluid elements over a commercial production timeframe, and making them look good at HD quality. When creating CG fluids that are moving non-turbulently, you have a lot more leeway with short timeframes because the level of fluid detail is relatively low. This isn’t the case for turbulent, volumetrically rendered fluid like ink in water or smoke. For these cases, it requires detail to sell the scale and level of turbulence – it’s literally the detail in the fluid that makes it realistic.

via CGSociety – SeaWorld.

Graphics commercial, fusioncis, krakatoa, ntropic

If you’ve seen the RealFlow promotional material, then you’ve no doubt seen the giant ‘liquid brain’ image used in the branding.  That image was generated by Fusion CI Studios and DMG for Fonterra’s “Whole Water” commercial we’ve covered before.  In fact, the commercial was instrumental in some of the features added to RealFlow5.

The brain is particularly meaningful because its creation is a tribute to the ongoing joint development efforts between Next Limit Technologies and Fusion CI Studios. Next Limit had only recently upgraded RealFlow with Python scripting capabilities at the time, so co-owner and VFX sup at Fusion, Mark Stasiuk, was able to use that to build a proprietary fluid morphing behavior with features that went beyond RealFlow’s native toolset. And, after seeing the demonstration of the fluid morphing capability in the “Whole Water” spot, Next Limit’s developers were inspired to create an improved fluid morphing tool within RealFlow 5. That brain represents a “whole” lot of action on the leading-edge of CG fluid fx!

See more information about the project after the break.

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Graphics dmg, fusioncis, realflow

When was the last time you ran a fluid simulation for your visual effects shot and when it was done you sat back and thought “Perfect”.  I’ll bet it’s been a while, if ever.  CG Fluids are notoriously hard, and the reason why is best described in this paragraph from FusionCIS:

CG fluid, especially “SPH” fluid (smoothed particle hydrodynamics), suffers from inaccurate physics at the microscopic level, at the scale of individual particles making up the fluid. Even when simulating with very large particle numbers, this becomes a major problem wherever the fluid becomes splashy since it forms thin sheets and strings — or rather, it should form thin sheets and strings, like we see in real water. Hi-speed macrophotography of fluid spashes classically show how delicate, impossibly thin and continuous sheets of fluid fly thru the air and stay coherent for prolonged periods. These produce tiny droplets and hair-like strings of fluid from their margins but otherwise hold together for a long time, before they eventually and suddenly burst apart. CG fluids on the other hand always break apart immediately, forming very unattractive and distinctly un-real cheese-like holes and webbing, never holding together in thin sheets.

So what do you do?  Most people tend to try and hide the effect with careful camera tricks, motion blur, or just add more particles.  A new technology from FusionCIS called “Smorganic” can fix this by closing the holes created during the simulations, and create amazing new life-like simulated results, as shown in the image above of “honey” pouring over a sphere:

The image below is a render of a simulation of pouring “honey”, where we’ve set smorganic to disallowo any holes in the fluid. The results show the smoothness of the resulting meshes despite the high-spec, high-refractive nature of the shader and lighting, and despite a hard impact with a rigid body.

Hit their website for more pictures and sample movies.

via FusionCIS PR Smorganic.

Graphics, Science cfd, fusioncis, simulation, vfx, water