For the ocean and water FX in Milk, we needed everything from small splashes up to large and stormy deep-water ocean surfaces that have a few interactions. It was mainly divided into shape, deformation, interaction, surfaceshading and lighting. Four TDs were working on individual effects. Andreas Gebhardt provided the Tessendorf deep water deformer in Soft, Jacob Slutsky created all the broken up water splashes, Jimmy Gaas worked on the crest particles and mist FX, and I rigged, shaded and rendered the ocean and water. The biggest restriction we had was time, so we had to rush through all those shots and FX.

The water FX on Absolute, very much differed from the ones in Milk. Small scale, zero gravity water splashes and surfaces. I used Michele Sandroni's great Metaballs Plugin on polygon meshes, which I simply pushed and deformed as needed to get the shapes. The resulted surface was then additionally being deformed by a perlin noise deformer, which was also provided by Michele's tools. In the shader, I added another 3 layers of different noise frequencies used as bumpmaps, blended together with fractal noise in order to get a variety of both irregular and calm areas.

The idea was to generate a fractal in 3D space on which all the instances then could be placed automatically. After a while we had a couple of different approaches but none of which we could really utilize. Fractals like the Mandelbrot are two-dimensional images and at the time there was no way to make them in 3D. Just recently 3D approaches of fractals like the "Mandelbulb" came up. We eventually placed a fractal image into the scene and then zoomed into the fractal by scaling the whole scene around the center where we wanted to fly in. Andreas Gebhardt wrote a custom FX Tree node for us which simply generated fractals like the "Mandelbrot". Once we had an interesting looking pattern everybody liked, we placed all the bottles along the fractal by hand. Because of the self-similar nature of a fractal, the work had to be only done for one level or branch. It could then be translated into the new level. Rendering and lighting was a straight forward process. For the transition from the live action footage in and out of the fractal, we had a 3D camera solve of the footage and then back-projected the footage onto a rebuilt CG environment from that camera. At the time of transition the render camera slowly departs from the tracked or back-projected camera into the fractal. It involved some painting here and there, but was a nice and fun VFX process.

The CG Team worked on many 3D ink elements and had fluid simulations running 24/7. And Design painted many great styleframes and textures. Oh yeah, and then there was a Motion Capture shoot. We tried to nicely blend everything together as much as possible in comp. We exported all the 3D info for comp so that they can attach their elements to the characters and environment. The compositors were very dedicated and built most of the environment out of live action footage placed into 3D space of the compositing system.

We animated and modeled the characters in Maya and had a pipeline working in which the final animated geometry of each day gets baked and exported into Softimage for lighting and rendering, plus all the additional FX. Instead of rendering the scene as usual with different material and light attributes like diffuse, ambient, color, reflection, shadow, ambient occlusion, etc., I tried to render everything in multiple different lighting scenarios. So I rendered out the different light sources in the scene and ended up with passes like sunset, pool light, interior lights, exterior light, etc. This is how you would also shoot a live action scene with motion control and it worked great. It was working for this spot because the geometry and the materials in the scene were so simple. It was a little more expensive on the renderfarm, but I would like to continue to explore a more complicated spot with this approach.