Making Of - Station Rise Shot (Sea Serpent's Song)

All Breakdowns/Screenshots © NiallHornVFX

All Final Stills © Island Tribe Productions

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Hi Guys,

I now have time to write up the making of the Station Rise shot I did for the upcoming Canadian film, The Sea Serpents Song. I am the Lead FX Artist on the project, doing mainly all the FX Shots aswell as finishing them all the way to comping them. I have my Meteor Vs Building Shot very close to been completed also, which I've been working on and off for 2 months ish. Aswell as numerous other Projects and my big Personal Project for later this year!

I started this project in Mid February and worked on it throughout February to early March. I started the project aged 17 and am now 18 haha! The reason I got approached by Tribe Productions was because of my Space Pyramid Rise Shot/RnD I did, I have a big focous on not only doing FX RnD but actually making a complete shot from this to improve my 3D Generalist Skills, as I usally end up doing lots of Lighting,Rendering and Most of the Compositing.

This shot gave me an opportunity to work on my RealFlow To 3DS Max Pipeline, I didn't have acess Krakatoa due to the budget so I switched to VRay for rendering everything (See Below). I also have been working on a "Toolkit" of Ocean Shaders and a PFlow tool for creating WhiteWater in Max.

Watch My VFX Breakdown Here!

Shot Production

The first two days of production were spent doing the Shot Layout and modelling a Proxy Mesh for the station, due to it been high poly and not modelled with Fluid Sims in mind. I am not a fan of this part at all! The station is quite a unique shape so I built the proxy in diffrent parts and then merged them together, to create the final proxy mesh. I knew the camera wasn't going to be very close, however at the same time this shot was to be rendered at 3000x1500 so the interaction/fluid collisions had to be pretty soild.

 Modelling Proxy Mesh

I was able to quickly test each proxy's Volume in RealFlow

The Next step was the RealFlow sims, I've done objects rising out the water before, each time I hope to get better and better. One thing I knew once again is that when you have a large object rising out a body of water there is not much fluid thats in a liquid/mesh state however there is lots of Whitewater and cascading Spray and Mist. Theres not much reference for this (If you dont count other FX Shots) however there is a really nice video of an Iceberg rolling over in Antarctica and you can see the iceberg breaching upwards from the ocean and that served as good reference for the shot. This shot was actually harder in some ways than Space Pyramid Rise, as the Station is a lot smaller in size, however its still got to look big and cinematic as it rises, also its rising a lot slower, so this presented the challenge all FX Artists face... Getting the Scale Right!

The Base/Core Fluid RealFlow Sim

I continued to use my "OFF Surface Bubbling Method" I devised where I use FumeFX to sim smoke swirls and then render this as a greyscale pass and use it as an animated texutre in RealFlows Ocean Force Field, to advect the grey-scale velocities into the fluid, thus creating the effect of bubbling you see when a large object breaches from the ocean, this is caused by the object pushing and creating large amounts of bubbles underwater which are pushed to the surface before the object rises. Igor Zanic created a workflow (based on ILM's Battleship Siggraph talk) in Houdini where he uses a PyroFX Sim advected into a FLIP Sim to create not only surface bubbling but also simulates airflow in the fluid which greats some super amazing Fluid Sims!

 Creating the FumeFX Smoke Swirl Sims In Max

The OFFs Scattered Across the Surface

The Core fluid sim was ran overnight with around 35 Million particles, the detail did not need to be that high as I knew I would be slicing the mesh off above the height as the Whitewater sims would take over. There was around 7 (Lowres/Midres) Iterations of the core fluid sim, my main problem as mentioned above is scale, you can have stringy fluid all over the station as instantly it looks like the fluid is a bath tub! So aswell as the bubbling force fields I also used bounded noise fields to break up the breach further thus breaking the fluid up more, I also use a bit of vorticity boost and played with the interaction factor. The simulation scale was the closest to real-world scale i've ever done however I still used low gravity and drag to fake the large fluid scale/behaviour further for cinematic effect,

All Secondary Sims were exported as Alembic Files and Stitched through RealFlows Alembic Siticher tool so they could be rendered through V-Ray 3.0's Alembic Proxy (possibly the coolest feature in VRay 3. Well worth the upgrade!). 

The main Secondary sims, were Splash (Hybrido- Dumb Particles) Foam and Bubbles (Hybrido-FLIP) aswell as the cascading spray which was an RealFlow Object emitter using Dumb Particles streaming from the station proxy, using noise fields and wind to get nicer swirls/turbulence in the whitewater. A Low res mist simulation was also ran using RealFlows VDB Mist which was rendered in RealFlowRenderKit (MentalRay).

Meshing With ThinkBox's Frost 

The Meshing was done using the PRT Files from the Core Fluid sim (Hybrido) through Thinkbox Frost. No budget for Krakatoa here, so I faked the Velocity Shading by using a Refraction pass of the fluid mesh and some comp work! The Alembic Secondarines were loaded through VRay Proxy and I ran some quick test renders to see how the shot was looking.

Early Test Render/Slap Comp

One thing a lot of people dont do (including me untill now!) is render specular passes with Whitewater, you end up with flat looking spray/foam renders without using Specular, you have to remeber that water is extremely reflective no matter what sate its in, and Foam is lots of small bubbles when you look closesly, so specular plays a big role. I simulated Normals in RealFlow for all the secondarines and used Specular and Reflection Passes in V-Ray which were comp'd into the Beauty Whitewater Renders to add more specularity. 

WhiteWater Pass Rendering

The Ocean Displacement was created using HOT (Houdini Ocean Toolkit/HOT4MAX) that creates the main waves, I then use fractal noise maps to create bump and displacement at render time for the smaller surface waves. I was matching the ocean to a plate shot on a RED EPIC Camera in 5K so that gave me some great reference! One thing I also did was the Full lookdev/Shader Setup of the Station, I had to re UV some of the station which is always a pain, the shader setups were done using VRay, the client provided the base Diffuse Maps, I then painted some basic bump maps as well as using Procedural Noise and Fractals for extra Bump maps and Specular Maps.

Station Turntable

The Compositing was done as the renders were coming out, I orignally planned to do all the fog in comp as 3D Layers, however this didn't hold up well for the foreground fog so I used VRays Environment Fog to get an atmospheric pass for the lights on the station shining through which helped sell the shot I think. The rest of the fog was done in comp though. Another first for me was the original plan for the shot was to comp in the Station/Fluid mesh into a Live Action plate of an Actress in a Kayak, However I presented some tests to the client who decided we would Roto the Kayak out and add it in the CG Shot. I managed to pull a pretty good key on the Kayak and did some basic roto to blend it into the shot.

 Compositing in After Effects

Comparing the Fog Amount

Once I was happy with the comp, there was a few iterations between me and the client to get the shot looking great! The shot was completed on March 7th (2015).

See Top Of Page For Breakdown!

Thanks For Looking Guys, 

My Personal project will be done this week, with another Blog Writeup explaining the Making of! My Main project is now doing more work on a very FX heavy Sequence for The Sea Serpents Song.

I also want to say big thanks to Next Limit for there support as I continue to use RealFlow on bigger and more ambitious shots. I hope to do a second RealFlow 2015 Beta test if I get time this spring.


-NIALL