Case Studies
Doctor Who (The Mill)
The award-winning British science fiction show Doctor Who has been back on the little screen for a while and is now running its fourth series. In episode 2, “The Fires of Pompeii”, the Doctor definitely doesn’t like it hot, fighting against psychic powers, stone beasts, and the destruction of an angry, erupting volcano spitting out RealFlow-simulated lava floods, created by renowned VFX house The Mill. Want to know how they did it? Just read on….
Next Limit: Tell us, why RealFlow?
Andy Guest, 3D Visual Effects Artist at The Mill: “We used RealFlow to create the lava spurts exploding out of the volcano in the Doctor Who episode “The Fires of Pompeii”. The generated RF mesh was used with FumeFX to create all the lava and pyroclastic outer flows. RealFlow gave us really nice, detailed lava spurts, which we used for the source to drive the FumeFX pyroclastic ash and smoke. RealFlow and FumeFX are unique in their fields. There is nothing else like them – and therefore combined they are extremely powerful. They worked together perfectly for this kind of effect. Though still not easy, RF and FumeFX allowed us to create something otherwise extremely difficult, confidently and within a reasonable time (just so long as you're prepared to stare at progress bars for most of the time). Also, RealFlow is a mature product; we could rely on it. When planning the shot we could say ‘RealFlow will do it’.”
NL: How did you go about creating this?
AG: “First stage, we modeled the volcano in Maya in low resolution, creating the rough shape of our volcano (the Vesuvius) in 2 two stages: before and after exploding. The Maya objects were then taken into ZBrush for rock detailing. I then took the modeled volcano back into Maya and Camera-Projected a custom-painted volcano texture onto the model. After that we went about simulating all the dust and rock passes for the explosion, which was done in Maya with Particle Instancing and Particle Clouds. Added to this were the RealFlow and FumeFX passes, creating all the pyroclastic flows. We did about 6 RealFlow simulations for the different lava spurts, and these were about 100,000 particles each, which gave us a nice level of the big scale required. In the end we used over 50 render passes for the Vesuvius eruption shot, which was composited in Shake.”
NL: So what soft and hardware did you use exactly, apart from RealFlow?
AG: “We used Maya, Z-brush, Photoshop, 3dsMax 9 with FumeFX and Shake. We also used a few custom-made tools and scripts. On the hardware side we mainly used BOXX PCs running Linux and Windows 64 XP Pro for the 3dsMax/ FumeFX application.”
NL: Tell us about the RealFlow and FumeFX workflow…..
AG: “Nick Webber (3D Visual Effects Artist) had been testing FumeFX for a while, and was very impressed with the output speed and quality he got from the 3dsMax plug-in. When it came to creating the exploding volcano, we did some tests using the Meshes generated from the RealFlow Lava Spurts, which were taken into 3dsMax, and used as the source of the FumeFX Pyroclastic Fluid.”
NL: Did you make the simulation in passes or all together?
AG: “We did about six different RealFlow simulations for different sides of lava spurts, and these were about 100k particles each.”
NL: For how long have you been using RealFlow?
AG: “I started using RF on the Captain Scarlet Show, back in 2004. It was simple even back then to integrate it into our LightWave/ Maya pipeline, but the computers were far less capable than today so the simulations took a lot longer!”
NL: What was the most difficult part of the project?
AG: “Well, it has to be getting the scale looking correct. The big problem when doing RealFlow simulations (or indeed in any simulation software) is having enough particles so the movement looks large enough and in the case of a volcano that’s very big! Another problem was caching the FumeFX passes – they were very memory and disk hungry, with each frame taking around 200MB of disk space with RAM usage around 8GB. We soon began to run out of disk space… For these shots we used up about 2TB of disk space just on the cache files alone.”
NL: What kind of time schedule were you on for the creation of this show?
AG: “We had one month to do all the volcano shots (we had about ten volcano shots) and more or less the same for the creature fire FX shots. The problem was that for a single pyroclastic pass it was taking 24 hours to cache the files, so it was hard work to get it finished. But nothing in our mini-pipeline slowed us down except for the throwing of vast amounts of data around the network. We had plenty of time to "tweak" the simulations....it’s all fast enough now so no more "hit simulate and hope for the best" scenarios.
NL: How do you think RealFlow could be improved or what would you like to see implemented into the program?
AG: “Like everybody doing FX work, we always want more processing power! So it would be really good if it would be possible to calculate a simulation across multiple computers. Also a better Sim Previewer would be handy, maybe something like doing a playblast in Maya.”
About The Mill
NL: How big was the team working on this show?
AG: “The main FX team on this show was Nick Webber and I, and we had a core team about 23 people working on everything, from Production, Modeling, Rigging, Animation, through to Final Compositing and Grading.”
NL: Please tell us a bit about The Mill in general….
AG: “The Mill is a world-leading visual effects company with offices in the three most important global advertising centers: London, New York and LA. For over 17 years The Mill has been providing pioneering effects solutions to the advertising, music and entertainment industries. The Mill is a privately owned company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Mill Digital Media Ltd.
Making the impossible possible is our mantra as The Mill’s groundbreaking effects work continues to set new creative benchmarks and industry standards.”
NL: Do you plan to use RealFlow on any future projects?
AG: “RealFlow is part of our FX pipeline. I am currently using it to create some CG spit! Nice….”
Copyright:
The Mill – www.the-mill.com
Credits:
3D
Nick Webber: FX
Andy Guest: FX
Adam Burnett
Jean-Claude Deguara
Neil Roche
Ruth Bailey
Nicolas Hernandez
2D
Simon Wicker: Matte Painter
Alex Fort: Matte Painter
Charlie Bennett: Matte Painter
Russell Horth
Bryan Bartlett
Murray Barber
Adriano Cirulli
Sara Bennett
Matthew Clarke: Editorial
Mark Bright: Editorial
Will Cohen: VFX Producer
Marie Jones: VFX Producer
David Houghton: VFX Supervisor
Jenna Powell: VFX Coordinator
Rebecca Johnson: VFX Coordinator
Marianne Paton: VFX Production Assistant
Tim Barter: VFX on-set Supervisor
Mick Vincent: Grade
|
