Rugby World Cup NZ 2011 CG Water

This is stuff I created for "Perceptual Engineering". They created the video sequences for the opening ceremony of the 2011 Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. Awesome awesome show!

I did all the water simulation/rendering. Here you see some layers used, for both ocean flyover and then river/waterfall/lake.

About the process:

Simulation in RealFlow, shading/rendering in Cinema 4D.

File Output: Some TB for simulation, quite 0.4TB or a little more for rendering (all 1080p, 9 Passes, 32 bit, multiple versions of course).

Problems: As always...RealFlow had some problems with the scale and required detail of the scene. The Grid solvers efficiency (computational) decreases as resolution increases. I simulated at 0.45m cell size in a pretty big scene (72 million particles per frame before erasing invisible parts during cam animation). That gave me an average 10-20% CPU usage on my machine (during 65 hours of simulation). Higher resolutions are not "possible". It would take hours to even start the sim (freeze, then after some time you can watch the domain fill the emission volume with particles and that takes...long time). Splash simulation would not work unless I used really low detail and too big position variation values. That makes it low detail and more like spray rather than solid water...but ok, you see what came out. I can tell you it is not the detail I desired. Same for grid: I had to use GridMesh, because renderkit mesher can only mesh 50million particles on a 24GB machine. But I had 72m...fail. Lost a lot of detail there...in the end of the project I built the new machine (specs on my profile page). It has 48GB memory and easily mastered the renderkit meshes for all frames. But they are really messed up. Displacement does not work properly on them...flipped verts and this tiny triangles and bumps in the displaced mesh. So I had to reduce displacement...and use more bump maps. Foam same as splash: Crash, Crash, Crash, Crash, Crash, Crash, Crash, mental breakdown.

Cinema 4D did well...everything stable and really easy to deal with. huge meshes are slow, but there are tricks. IF ONLY C4D WOULD SUPPORT MORE THAN 10MILLION PARTICLES PER SCENE ! ! !

River and waterfall were easier...But same problems in RF: low detail grid mesh, fucked up renderkit mesh.
if RealFlow was more consequently improved and OLD PROBLEMS FIXED before new ones are created...and if it were more STABLE (wtf! ! !) then it could be the very most convenient and great liquid simulator around (apart from naiad solver^^). But Im not sure if I will ever see this happen.

All mistlayers for waterfall and river were created with Maya Fluids. Pretty straight forward, quite fast and easy to use. Rendering with MR (mist). Could also be done with Turbulence FD in Cinema 4D but I only have a beta. And Maya does a great job.

hmm...nothing else to say I think. Comment, rate, subscribe. And please checkout "Perceptual Engineering". Heres a link:

http://perceptual-engineering.com/#2048677/Rugby-World-Cup-Opening-Ceremony

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• PE
• Perceptual
• engineering
• new
• zealand
• NZ
• water
• simulation
• realflow
• DS
• C4D
• Maxon
• Cinema
• 4D
• render
• SSS
• hybrido
• splash
• foam
• fluidsimulation
• fluid
• rugby
• world
• cup
• opening
• ceremony
• ocean
• flyover
• CG
• river
• waterfall
• lake

[kautschukmedia]

i hereby declare you the messiah of RF.

i think it's really cool that you write down your experiences in the description, pls keep on doing that!

[DragonsSpirit]

@kautschukmedia

haha thanks^^ yes will do . . . mist layers were created with Maya Fluids btw.

[akaltaroid]

@kautschukmedia I have to agree totally, its awesome to see those things.... i have many problems with rf stability too... even on lowscale(got 8GB ram but never ever had more than a million particles)..

for example when i use breaking multijoint, and the object stops moving after broken from link RF just crashes...

grid fluid and angular motors are crashy too..

[onlyCreativity]

"if RealFlow was more consequently improved and OLD PROBLEMS FIXED before new ones are created...and if it were more STABLE (wtf! ! !) then it could be the very most convenient and great liquid simulator around (apart from naiad solver^^)"

apart from Naiad of course. :D

[persoonaje]

Salute !!! really huge job!!! Congrats. I remember when i was dealing with huge simulation on 4gb machine, I almost went crazy "not stable meshing""slow sim" and so on... but will wait for something crazier, to be impressed. GOOD LUCK ;)